Professional Documents
Culture Documents
am
Co
py
py
Co
am
Ex
Copyright 1998 The President and Fellows of Harvard College
py
Ex
am
Co
Dorothy Holland
William Lachicotte Jr.
Debra Skinner
Carole Cain
H A R VA R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
1998
py
Ex
am
Co
py
Contents
vii
Preface
III
IV
19
49
Figured Worlds
66
98
Positional Identities
125
144
Authoring Selves
169
192
214
10
MAKING WORLDS
11
12
253
13
Identity in Practice
270
Ex
Co
II
am
Notes
289
References
317
Credits
339
Index
341
py
Co
am
Ex
Copyright 1998 The President and Fellows of Harvard College
py
Preface
Co
Ex
am
viii
Preface
Ex
am
Co
py
Preface
ix
Ex
am
Co
py
py
Co
am
Ex
Copyright 1998 The President and Fellows of Harvard College
Ex
am
Co
py
py
Co
am
Ex
Copyright 1998 The President and Fellows of Harvard College
Ex
am
Co
py
On the Shoulders of
Bakhtin and Vygotsky
py
Co
am
Ex
Copyright 1998 The President and Fellows of Harvard College
Co
py
am
People tell others who they are, but even more important, they tell
themselves and then try to act as though they are who they say they are.
These self-understandings, especially those with strong emotional resonance for the teller, are what we refer to as identities. A man interviewed
by Lachicotte, Roger Kelly,1 diagnosed as having a mental disorder, struggled with who to be: Im only 35. I mean I wikind of wish I was 60,
and I was done with all . . . It would make things simpler, you know, Im
disabled. Ill just live out my last few years and do a little good works and
try to enjoy my day. But when youre only 35 theres pressure to get back
in there and try it again. Ive tried four or ve times. Ive been up in the
hospital ve times now. How many more times do I have to try?
Tika Damai, a girl of fteen in a community in central Nepal, when
asked by Skinner to tell about herself and her life, answered by singing a
series of folksongs, which began:
Ex
Co
py
were producing, from the cultural resources available to them, understandings of themselves that seemed to be not only of (about) themselves, representing the dilemmas of their respective social situations,
but also for themselves. These productions gured in their communication with themselves about their past and present actions. We picture
Roger, Tika, ourselves, and other individuals and groups as always engaged in forming identities, in producing objectications of self-understandings that may guide subsequent behavior. This vision emphasizes
that identities are improvisedin the ow of activity within specic
social situationsfrom the cultural resources at hand. Thus persons
and, to a lesser extent, groups are caught in the tensions between past
histories that have settled in them and the present discourses and images
that attract them or somehow impinge upon them. In this continuous
self-fashioning, identities are hard-won standpoints that, however dependent upon social support and however vulnerable to change, make at
least a modicum of self-direction possible. They are possibilities for mediating agency.
Ex
am
Ex
am
Co
py
Identity is a concept that guratively combines the intimate or personal world with the collective space of cultural forms and social relations. We are interested in identities, the imaginings of self in worlds of
action, as social products; indeed, we begin with the premise that identities are lived in and through activity and so must be conceptualized as
they develop in social practice. But we are also interested in identities as
psychohistorical formations that develop over a persons lifetime, populating intimate terrain and motivating social life. Identities are a key
means through which people care about and care for what is going on
around them. They are important bases from which people create new
activities, new worlds, and new ways of being. In some chapters we will
pay great attention to the ways in which persons are malleable, changeable, and subject to discursive powers. In others we will show more
respect for persons generativity, their capacitiesembedded always in
collective meanings and social relationsto imagine and create new
ways of being. Human agency may be frail, especially among those with
little power, but it happens daily and mundanely, and it deserves our
attention. Humans capacity for self-objecticationand, through objectication, for self-directionplays into both their domination by social
relations of power and their possibilities for (partial) liberation from
these forces.
The metatheoretical shift to practice, coupled with what might be
called the critical disruption in the social sciences, the humanities, and
some areas of psychology, has cleared a space for new understandings of
persons. Cultural studies, joined to feminist theorys engagement with
issues of identity, invite us to see persons taking form in the ow of
historically, socially, culturally, and materially shaped lives.3 At the same
time, a more sociogenic approach to personhood has developed. The
task we undertake here is inspired not only by contemporary cultural
studies but also by the intellectual tradition that includes the great Soviet
psychologist L. S. Vygotsky, his students, and other members of what has
come to be called the cultural-historical or sociohistorical school of psychology. Equally important to our tradition is another gure from the
same period and place, the critical theorist and semiotician M. M. Bakhtin. To comprehend and articulate a vision of both person and society
true to the parts played by cultural forms, the machinery of power and
social positioning, and the continual processes of identication, we join
the work of Bakhtin, Vygotsky, and their colleagues to contemporary
Ex
am
Co
py
debates (a link that, especially in the case of Vygotsky, has been made
before; see, for example, Gergen 1994; van der Veer and Valsiner 1991;
Wertsch 1991).
Bakhtins work was inspired by a neo-Kantian tradition of philosophy
that emphasized aesthetics.4 But Bakhtin did not rest content with this
difcult kind of idealism. He took his work in two directions, both of
which were more concerned with specic practices and persons than
with the generic practice of abstract (indeed quasi-transcendental) subjects. First, he studied literature and verbal art, looking most closely at
the means for representing characters and (therefore) authors. Second,
he began, with V. N. Voloshinov, a study of the sociology of human
expression, which also became a social psychology. Their works of 1929,
Marxism and the Philosophy of Language and Problems of Dostoevskys
Poetics, intertwine these two lines to create an understanding of human
expression that seems more at home in the cultural studies of today than
in either the social science or the literary studies of the time.
Vygotsky came to his study of persons from interests in literature, art,
and linguistics. His 1925 dissertation, The Psychology of Art, included an
analysis of a short story, Bunins Gentle Breath. His fascination with the
way the closing image of the story transformed the whole feeling of the
piece was part of his more general engagement with the potential of
symbols to affect and reorganize experience. He carried this fascination
with symbols into his psychology and organized his later studies around
it. He construed symbols, particularly cultural symbols learned through
social interaction, as so many ways in which people free themselves from
the tyranny of environmental stimuli. But this work of freedom, for
Vygotsky, demanded an appreciation of time and timing. He took a genetic or developmental approach because, in his handling, it was
difcult, if not impossible, to understand a persons behavior without
knowing the opportunistic history of its formation.
Bakhtins concern with the social weighing of expression and the creative life of association, combined with Vygotskys emphases on historical
development and on the potentiality of symbols for (re)formation, affords a means by which cultural studies of the person may avoid a common conceptual dilemmaone that traps persons permanently, either in
cultural logics or in subject positions or in some combination of the
two. This is our objective here: to respect humans as social and cultural
creatures and therefore bounded, yet to recognize the processes whereby
Ex
am
Co
py
Ex
am
Co
py
py
proaches that we work to transcend, the person is driven by an internalized cultural logic; in the more recent, by social situation. In order to
communicate what we nd important about these two approaches, we
simplify them to two ideal types.
Ex
am
Co
10
Ex
am
Co
py
also of the Sunar caste. Debra called down to Gyanumaya that we wanted
to talk to her on the balcony, and went down to greet her, intending to
bring her through the kitchen and up the stairs. However, as Debra was
on her way downstairs, Gyanumaya took a different route: she scaled the
outside of the house. She somehow crawled up the vertical outside wall,
made her way around the balcony to an opening in the railing, came
through the opening, and sat down. Gyanumaya knew that Debra did
not prohibit lower-caste people from entering her kitchen, but she found
a way to get to the place of our interview without going through the
house.
I later questioned Debra about her knowledge of the community. Did
she know of other people who scaled the outside of houses to get to the
second oor? Was Gyanumaya in particular known to enter houses in
this way? As far as we could discern, no community members were
accustomed to getting to the second stories of houses by climbing up the
walls. Nor did Gyanumaya have a reputation for whimsical or unusual
behavior.
How Gyanumaya herself interpreted her climb we do not know. We
did not ask her to explain her action. For me, her climb became an icon
of limitationan example to use in writing, in talks, and in teaching to
point out the limitations of culturalist approaches (see, for example,
Holland 1992b). Here the story lends itself to both a culturalist and an
opposing constructivist interpretation. Gyanumaya had undeniably
climbed above a culturalist approach, but her actions raise issues about
the constructivist one as well.
After I had said to myself, Yes, she really did climb up the house! my
next thought was about caste. I had an image of caste identication,
ingrained in the Sunar woman, propelling her away from the sin of
polluting anothers hearth, to the extreme that sent her up the wall. I
tried in vain to think of a culturally given sense of myself that could have
moved me to such a physical feat. My image, rapidly conceived in reaction to a startling event, provides a good caricature of the culturalist
approach. Culturethe cultural signicance of caste and pollution
learned from childhoodwas an essential force inside Gyanumaya, directing her behavior.
According to this rst interpretation, Gyanumayas climb lent dramatic corroboration to a culturalist theory and justied careful and
11
Ex
am
Co
py
12
Ex
am
Co
py
13
Ex
am
Co
py
14
Ex
am
Co
py
15
Co
py
perspective and offered by the constructivist one, and vice versa. But
there is no reason to pretend that they are so separate in action. Gyanumaya was no doubt swayed, as most of us are in any situation, by multiple and mixed thoughts and feelings. Dialogic perspectives, such as Bakhtins (1981), explicitly free us from the idea that we as a group or as
individuals can hold only one perspective at a time. Humans are both
blessed and cursed by their dialogic naturetheir tendency to encompass a number of views in virtual simultaneity and tension, regardless of
their logical compatibility. Our own perspective puts together the culturalist and the constructivist positions in a dialogic frame.
Ex
am
16
Ex
am
Co
py
monies and the ideas and practices of the leaders. Within weeks I was
mired in a crisis of condence. I had been taught that people followed
cultural patterns. Where were the obedient pattern-followers? I even
began to doubt that anyone ever coordinated his or her behavior with
anyone else. If the newspaper reported that two people had engaged in
the same activity, I was skeptical.
But I continued to attend Shango feasts. After several more weeks I
calmed down and concentrated on the commonalties I had started to
notice across the Shango practitioners. I noted the conventionalized emphases and understandings that threaded their way through the cacophony of differences. I was at last a successful anthropologist: I had found
the culture that was there. Other truthsa great deal of improvisation,
provoked by a great variety of social and material conditionsbecame
evident (see Holland and Crane 1987). The connections of the forms
created by the participants to postcolonial relations, to the location of the
particular groups in relation to urban centers, and to the position of
Shango in relation to the larger eld of religious activity (including the
established churches, Spiritual Baptism, and a more secretive activity,
circle-side work) are all clear in hindsight. But in my writing I paid
little attention to these features and instead distilled the culture of
Shango and detailed its effects, reshaping the values and lifestyles of
participants.
Gyanumayas climb up the house repeated, in microcosm, the same
opportunity to focus on commonalities and forget the differences. One
could ignore the improvisational character of her feat and instead wonder, as I rst did, at the power of the cultural proscriptions of caste, the
products of collective social history, to guide an individuals actions.
Constructivism takes the opposite tack. It invites notice of the improvisation as a sign of positioning by powerful discourses. Gyanumaya
then becomes an instrument and an outcome of the situation, a person
pushed rst into one subject position (as a welcome guest) and then into
another (as a bearer of pollution). In the extreme, especially in circumstances deemed postmodern, according to constructivists, people constantly face such disjoint situations. Feminist poststructuralists emphasize that women and other oppressed people are especially subject to
situations like Gyanumayas, situations replete with contradictions. Oppressed people are constantly climbing up houses.
We advocate paying more attention to the improvisation itself, to what
was produced. We try to see both culture and subject position at the
17
Ex
am
Co
py
18
Ex
am
Co
py
tions for which we have no set response. Such improvisations are the
openings by which change comes about from generation to generation.
They constitute the environment or landscape in which the experience
of the next generation sediments, falls out, into expectation and disposition. The improvisations of the parental generation are the beginning of
a new habitus for the next generation. Pace Bourdieu, we suggest that the
process is also condensed into the space of a lifetime. In our view, improvisations, from a cultural base and in response to the subject positions offered in situ, are, when taken up as symbol, potential beginnings
of an altered subjectivity, an altered identity.13
Such productions, we believe, are always being appropriated by people
as heuristic means to guide, authorize, legitimate, and encourage their
own and others behavior. As an often unintended but sometimes purposive consequence, there is a continual process of heuristic development: individuals and groups are always (re)forming themselves as persons and collectives through cultural materials created in the immediate
and the more distant past. In this process of heuristic development,
culture and subject position are joined in the production of cultural
resources that are then subjectively taken up.
The possibilities of heuristic development do not mean that humans
are free to develop whatever subjectivity they wish and to do whatever
strikes them at the moment. Far from it. Ones history-in-person is the
sediment from past experiences upon which one improvises, using the
cultural resources available, in response to the subject positions afforded
one in the present. The constraints are overpowering, yet not hermetically sealed. Improvisation can become the basis for a reformed subjectivity.
The ethnographic case studies we present in later chapters range
widely in their subjectsfrom persons coming to identify themselves as
non-drinking alcoholics to women workers and students living and
sometimes resisting the cultural politics of gender that position them;
from Roger Kelly, assembling identities from his psychiatric diagnoses, to
Tika Damai and other young women in Nepal imagining, through songs,
a world in which women escape patriarchal control. The conceptual
discussions interspersed among these ethnographic chapters emphasize
not only the contemporaneous processes but also the long-term, developmental character of identity formation as it moves through improvisation, conict, embodiment, and dialogue in social and historical time.
Co
py
Ex
am
In all places across the worldin Nepal, for example, or American Samoathere are ways of talking about what we might call a persons self
(or selves). That is, there are conventional means for representing the
intrinsic capacities and processes that are presumed to shape a persons
actions. These intrinsic capacities and processes are implicated in
reexive mediation of behavior, the objectifying, monitoring, and evaluating stances that a person sometimes takes toward his or her own behavior.1 This talk of, this discourse about, what we will call selves takes
many forms. It may consist of expressions implying a subjective sense of
oneself as an actor/subject; it may be embedded in claims about others or
expressed directly in pontications about the self by specialists. Nepalis
and Samoans have ways of talking about selves, but their discourses
differ from those prevalent in the United States. They also engage in
activities thought to affect the self, practices of the self, that are not
necessarily common in the United States (see, for example, Clement
1982 on Samoan therapeutic procedures for mental disorders).
Parish (1991, 1994) has written about people living in the Kathmandu
Valley of Nepal who identify themselves as members of the Newar ethnic
group.2 At the time of his eldwork in the 1980s the Newar people he
met did not use any term that might be easily glossed in English as
self, but they talked about the heart in ways akin to our talk about the
self.3 Memories, thoughts, and feelings were stored in the heart (nuga);
willful actions came from the heart. English speakers in the United States
sometimes say things like Who knows whats in his heart? but the
19
Copyright 1998 The President and Fellows of Harvard College
20
Co
py
Newars talked about the heart in ways that would be readily understood
in English. They spoke, for example, of someone with no ability to
commit himself or follow through on moral action as lacking heart
blood. Furthermore, the self/heart was an abode of the sacred. They
spoke of a deity residing in their hearts and dictating morally commendable actions.
Parishs account of a distinctive self-discourse is not without company.
Fifty years of research by anthropologists and other cross-cultural researchers have provided examples from all parts of the globe. It is now
clear that there exists a huge variety of discourses, practices, concepts,
means, and modalities of the self.4 The question now is not so much
whether there are differences but rather what they signify. At issue is the
role of historical, social, and cultural phenomena in constituting the self.
How, if at all, do they inform the self that is their object? Stances toward
the ontological status of these self-discourses and practices lie at the
heart of the debates in the vast literature on the self.
Ex
am
Before the 1970s, anthropological work on culture and the self, like other
cross-cultural inquiries, developed primarily through a dialogue, sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit, between universalist and culturalist
perspectives.5 The oft-remarked division of labor between anthropology
and psychology (for example, Bloch 1985, Miller 1988) cast psychology
and psychologists as the champions of universalist perspectives and anthropology as the bastion of culturalist positions, but the dialogue was
also conducted within anthropology.
The debate is very familiar and can be recounted quickly. The point of
particular importance is the status attributed to specic discourses and
practices of the self. For those who assign theoretical priority to the
natural self, culture is subordinate to universal properties of human
psychology. The human self is, rst and foremost, a complex of natural,
species-given structures and processes. The selves found in Samoa are
simply refractions of an underlying natural self, as are those in Nepal.
Pliant to scientic probing, the natural self exists beneath the sometimes
dazzling but always thin overlay of cultural expression, of the ways of
enacting and talking about the selfmuch as the species-given human
body exists beneath culturally variable kinds of clothing.
21
Ex
am
Co
py
In this view, the natural self is akin to the heart or the liver. It is as
invariant as these organs and for the same reason: its ontology is that of a
natural phenomenon. From such a perspective, culturally distinct discourses of the self are simply more or less correct, more or less productive of scientically sound interventions, but scarcely signicant in any
other way. Even in the eld, we could often amalgamate the understandings of different groups to our own. So the Newars of Nepal talk
about a deity in their hearts. Could we not simply say that they have a
metaphorical way of talking about the superego? Misguided childrearing
practices may lead to pathologies of the natural self, just as poor eating
habits affect whether the heart becomes diseased, but the relationship is
the same no matter what the culture. Ones cultural background may
affect such things as whether ones self-esteem is high or low, yet self-esteem remains not only ascertainable but also a signicant correlate of
other aspects of the person, no matter the culture. Whether in a given
culture there exists a comparable concept, a similar discourse about
self-esteem, is irrelevant.
Countervailing culturalist positions cannot be captured by the clothing/body analogy. For them, culturally specic concepts are not coverings of the universal self. Instead they are indicators of contours of
culture that shape the self in profound ways. South Asian religious and
philosophical writings and pronouncements on the self, for example,
have been read by anthropologists such as Dumont (1980) and Marriott
(1976a, 1976b) as indicators of a culture deeply at odds with Western
culture. These anthropologists argue that South Asian cultures, especially dominant Hindu forms, grant value principally to the collective.
The culture derogates individuals to the point that, especially for Dumont, the Western concept of the individual is not very helpful in the
study of Indian societies.
Culturally variable discourses and concepts of the self are, in the culturalist view, not simply more or less accurate maps of the same territory,
but different maps that bespeak a difference in the territory. Shweder and
Bourne (1984), summarizing a large amount of cross-cultural literature,
identify two ideal types of self: a Western concept that is autonomous, acontextual, abstract, and independent; and a non-Western notion that is context-dependent, concrete, and socially dened: To the
question Does the concept of the person vary cross-culturally? our answer is obviously yes; we have tried to identify two major alternative
22
Ex
am
Co
py
conceptualizations of the individual-social relationship, viz., the egocentric contractual and the sociocentric organic (193).
For many anthropologists this research implies the proposition that
culture profoundly shapes selves.6 Different cultural conceptions of the
self are treated as indicators of underlying cultural themes that affect not
only conceptions of the self but also conceptions of emotion, child development, and mental disorders, as well as individuals patterns of cognition and affect. As Miller (1988: 280) puts it, the studies imply that
cultural content must be regarded as an essential inuence on the patterning of psychological structures and processes. The differences in
collective meaning systems, in other words, are productive, and therefore indicative, of profound and thoroughgoing differences in the selves
of those who are cultured in these systems. These cultural discourses and
their relationship to the self are not like the relation of the clothes to the
body, but more like that of a bottle to the liquid it contains. Self-discourses and practices must be scrutinized, for they are clues to the contours of the bottlethe culturethat shapes the malleable self.
Few anthropologists, if any, fully embrace the extremes of either the
universalist or the culturalist position. Rather they try to reconcile the
tensions between universalism and cultural specicity. For example, Hallowell (1955a, 1955b), who pioneered anthropological theories of the
self, argued that every person anywhere had a sense of himself or herself
as a separate being and could thus become an object to himself or herself.
For Hallowell, self-awareness and self-reexivity were universal, speciesgiven characteristics.7 He pointed out other invariant aspects of selves as
well, yet argued that many seemingly natural aspects of the self are, in
fact, culturally shaped and cannot be universally interpreted.8 For instance, in a culture where demons are taken seriously, a feeling that one
is being threatened by demons is indicative of culture, not of pathology
as it probably would be in a demonless culture.
More recent approaches to the problem of articulating the universal with the cultural include the work of the anthropologist Gananath
Obeyesekere (1981), who builds upon psychodynamic theories an account of important, universal structures and processes that, at the same
time, emphasizes cultural symbols. In his view, individuals appropriate
cultural symbols to assuage and manage the psychodynamically generated dilemmas that we all face.9 The medical anthropologist Thomas
Csordas (1994) draws upon the phenomenological psychology of Mer-
23
Co
py
Ex
am
24
Ex
am
Co
py
tions places people in categories that determine the treatment they receive in such institutions as mental institutions, prisons, and schools.
Technical categories, such as schizophrenic or at risk children, the
argument goes, also enter into or return to everyday discourse, and so are
used in schools and other institutions. People learn to treat one another
and themselves according to these categories.
This trafc between the scientic and the institutional, between the
scientic and the popular, belies the possibility that social scientists
could be what they claim to be: non-interfering, truth-telling observers.
Instead scientists, most obviously those whose ndings enter directly
into institutional treatments, become implicated in a kind of forced reductionism. Local knowledge is disregarded and replaced by scientic
categories imposed by those with power. No matter how scrupulous the
attempts of individual researchers to be objective, social scientists, today
as in the past, are studying what their eld of study has helped to create.
In this Foucauldian vision, unreexive claims to objectivity are hollow
at best; at worst they are a self-serving means by which science rhetorically claims authority.10
This critical stance has had a number of ramications in anthropology.
For one, culture, that is, anthropological descriptions of cultures, was
subjected to scrutiny and seen to be suspiciously entangled with systems
of power/knowledge. Looking back to past collaborations with colonial
governments, for example, anthropologists analyzed how anthropological constructions of the colonized informed governmental actions. Governments efforts to subjugate their colonized populations powerfully
constrained these peoples to reconstruct themselves, either in embrace
of or in opposition to the categories used to describe them.11 The guise of
scientist has thus become suspect to the point that many anthropologists
meet claims to scientic objectivity and authority with incredulity, if not
antagonism.
Feminists too have rigorously criticized past representations of culture, claiming that anthropologists often put forward patriarchal and
thus partial accounts. Twenty-ve years of feminist scrutiny have made it
impossible to ignore the importance of gender in all societies or to avoid
the recognition that what men may take to be important may well be
experienced in quite different ways by women. Twenty years ago Geertz
(1973a) could get away with analyzing the cockght in Bali, a solely
masculine activity, without paying particular attention to the social sig-
25
Ex
am
Co
py
nicance of its gendered quality, of who participated and who did not.
Today it is clear even to those who are not engaged by feminist theory
that women have different perspectives on the apparatuses of male privilegesuch as mens houses in Amazonian culturesthan men do; and
that their perspectives are not necessarily those which men wish them to
adopt (Gregor 1977). Clearly ones social positiondened by gender,
race, class, and any other division that is structurally signicantpotentially affects ones perspective on cultural institutions and the ardor of
ones subscription to the values and interpretations that are promoted in
rituals and other socially produced cultural forms.
These feminist critiques see many cultural discourses as impositions,
pushing women and men to behavior compatible with the structures and
institutions that favor members of one social category over another.
Feminists, then, provide yet another basis for suspecting descriptions of
seemingly holistic, coherent, integrated cultures. They ask: Whose account of the culture is being privileged? Whose view is being constructed as though it were the only one? And they answer: Not the view
of those in positions of restricted privilege. Accounts of culture that
ignore the importance of social position surreptitiously participate in the
silencing of those who lack privilege and power.
The critical disruption has further affected the writing of ethnographies across cultural boundaries. Texts, when conceived consistently
with a Foucauldian logic, invite the reader to regard anthropological
subjects from a certain perspective. Thus the writings of contemporary
ethnographers, as well as those of researchers in other elds, are now
vulnerable to criticism of their textual strategies. These strategies include more than theories about signicant structures and processes important to the question at hand; they also include the texts implications
about the position of the researcher relative to the people being studied
and relative to the reader. Ethnographic accounts are now critically read
for their portrayal of the relationship between anthropologist and subject, and many texts now include explicit sections that problematize
these relationships (for early examples see Favret-Saada 1980; Crapanzano 1980). It is now common for writers to consider critically the
perspective that they convey.
This critical disruption has a number of implications for comparison
across cultural boundaries. The very conceptions of culture have
changed drastically. Anthropology no longer endeavors to describe cul-
26
Co
py
Ex
am
27
Ex
am
Co
py
ble, of course. But the texts and other cultural media we create constrain,
according to social constructivists, readers to two choices: to comply
or to resist. Perhaps the discourses we use here are not hegemonic, and
perhaps we lack even momentary power to make the constraints we
place on our readers chafe; nonetheless, there exist other texts and
other discourses that cannot be similarly put aside. The subject of the
self is always open to the power of the discourses and practices that
describe it.13
The social constructivist position cannot be contained by the terms of
the prior universalist-culturalist debate. Indeed, from the standpoint of
constructivism all the phenomena addressed (and differentiated) by the
participants in that older debate might as well be collapsed into one
construct, an essential self. This essential self, a durable organization
of the mind/body, is perennially suspect as a product of essentialist
thinking, while the socially constructed self remains a paragon of antiessentialism.
The culturalist versions of essential selves have been especially subject
to criticism. Envisioned as stable and enduring characters set in place
(by the end of childhood) through rituals and other socializing practices
that distill and inculcate the core values of what were assumed to be
pervasive cultures, they are anathema to constructivism, a kind of double essentialism. Such selves persist through time, regardless of change
in social and material conditions. Socially constructed selves, in sharp
contrast, are subject to positioning by whatever powerful discourses they
happen to encounterchanging state policies that dictate new ways
of categorizing people in the census, educational diagnostics that label
some children at risk, or new forms of racist discourse taken up from
right-wing talk shows. Perhaps they are resistant to such social forces;
they nonetheless remain provisionally at their mercy. Social constructivism conceives discourses and practices to be the tools that build the self
in contexts of power, rather than as expressions of stable interpretations
of world and values that have been imparted to the person through
enculturation.
Indeed, the universalists and the culturalists (insofar as they still exist)
nd themselves unwitting allies, cast into the same essentialist camp.
The heated debates now concern the degree to which the essentialist self
is important at all. Again, when portraying this second debate, one must
not imagine two exclusive categories but rather a continuum between an
28
Co
py
extreme essentialist view, which pays absolutely no attention to the socially positioning power of discourses, and an extreme constructivist
position, which has no interest in any durable aspects of self. Most if not
all actual statements lie somewhere along the continuum and seek to
reconcile the tensions between what can be depicted as incompatible
views.14 One nds social constructivists, such as Hollway (1984), who,
despite their emphasis on discursive positioning, consider Lacanian concepts useful to delineate parts of the embodied self that endure and make
a difference in capitulation or resistance to social positioningor even
Foucault (1978) himself, who nds, beyond the discourses of sexuality, a
surplus of experience in the sexual pleasures of the body (Harvey
1996).
Ex
am
The critical disruption has, to put it mildly, interfered with the kind of
questions posed by Shweder and Bourne (1984) in their summary of
cross-cultural variation in concepts of the person. The intellectual and
political climate within anthropology has decisively changed, affecting
the questions that those of us engaged in studies of self and identity are
now pursuing.15
The newer research, in combination with past work, provides a basis
for a practice theory of self, one informed and fundamentally reformed,
but not determined, by the extreme versions of the critiques mounted in
the last twenty years.16 The more recent inquiries, though not always
undertaken in the name of critical psychological anthropology, nonetheless reect dimensions of the critical disruption. We can discern at
least three interrelated components of a theoretical reguring of the
relationship between culture and self. First, culturally and socially constructed discourses and practices of the self are recognized as neither the
clothes of a universally identical self nor the (static) elements of cultural molds into which the self is cast. Rather, differentiated by relations
of power and the associated institutional infrastructure, they are conceived as living tools of the selfas artifacts or media that gure the self
constitutively, in open-ended ways. Second, and correlatively, the self is
treated as always embedded in (social) practice, and as itself a kind of
practice. Third, sites of the self, the loci of self-production or self-process, are recognized as plural.
29
Ex
am
Co
py
The idea of plural, even competing sites of the self, is now common to a
variety of disciplines (see, for example, Smith 1988). In anthropology
the demise of the privileged concept of bounded, discrete, coherent cultures has made room for the recognition that people are exposed to
competing and differentially powerful and authoritative discourses and
practices of the self.
A series of articles in the journal Ethos in the early 1990s made this
point. This series challenges Shweder and Bournes separation of a Western egocentric or independent self from a non-Western sociocentric
or interdependent self. The articles particularly attack any monolithic,
essentialist version of the Western self. Their arguments take us
through some of the same terrain we have already explored. For instance, Ewing (1990) and Murray (1993) inveigh against the past tendency of anthropologists to write as though cultural discourses and practices of the self could be taken as indicators of core cultural themes
whose internalization yielded culturalized selves. But they resurvey
this ground with specic reference to culture and self, and they illustrate
the conceptual move to plural sites of self-fashioning. They call for the
disambiguation of the sites or sources of the self and imply that the
works drawn from these different production sites of self-discourses
and practices are not necessarily complementary.
Ewing, for example, says that the authoritative discourses on the self
found in religious and philosophical texts hardly exhaust the sites of
self-production. Popular discourses about the self are another important
locus. Anthropologists like Marriott and Dumont, Ewing argues, fail to
take account of the self as it is expressed by individuals in everyday talk
and action. Hence their account of self in South Asia, derived from
analyses of the talk and texts of specialists, is always partial and may not
coincide with the self construed by popular genres of speaking and acting. In particular, Ewing turns her criticism to the depiction of the Western self. Although Western representations of the self found in philosophical and psychological texts may indeed bespeak a person who is
autonomous, bounded, and transcontextual, peoples representations of
themselves in the stream of everyday life reveal a multitude of selves that
are neither bounded, stable, perduring, nor impermeable. Spiro (1993),
addressing a broader set of topics, makes some of the same points to
30
am
Co
py
support his thesis that the differences between the West and the nonWest have been greatly exaggerated.
Murray (1993) speaks to a different point. His argument has to do less
with discrepancies between selves founded in authoritative discourses
and selves depicted in everyday talk than with discrepant characterizations within Western authoritative discourse on the self. Western
philosophy, Western psychology, and Western religion do not, he argues,
present a unied conception of the self. He cites David Hume as a major philosophical gure whose depictions of the self were quite at odds
with those which supposedly characterize the West. If even authoritative
sources are far from being in agreement, where then does a Western
conception of self live?
Holland and Kipnis (1994) return to the venue of popular discourse.
They describe everyday discourses on embarrassment in the United
States and analyze the cultural model of self that underlies this talk. The
self that gets embarrassed is a sociocentric or, to use Markus and
Kitayamas (1991) terms, an interdependent self. Western ethnopsychologies, Holland and Kipnis conclude, like Murrays formal psychologies and philosophies, do not uniformly posit an egocentric self. Americans engage in discourses that are not consistent on the subject of
sociocentrism/egocentrism. Some posit a sociocentric or interdependent
self; others, an egocentric or independent self.
Selves in Practice
Ex
31
Ex
am
Co
py
As Miller (1988) points out in her review of the anthropological literature on concepts of self, these ndings t the generalization that some
groups emphasize more relational notions of the self while others, such
as those of the West, emphasize more individualistic ones. The caveat is
that such characterizations lend themselves to reication. We must take
care that American culture and Americans, for example, are not
construed in our specialist discourses as inherently egocentric or independent, or that Samoans culture and Samoans are not treated as though
they were, in essence, sociocentric or interdependent. Behavior is better
viewed as a sign of self in practice, not as a sign of self in essence. It is
sometimes useful to extract from the ow of events and discourses in a
particular locale important conceits or conceptsrecurring conventions
of thinking and behaving and constantly defended values. But the further stepassuming that this abstraction, this culture or the self
associated with it, has an essence, an impetus of its own that will continue through time, absent any social machinationshas been decisively
challenged (White 1993).17
Whether subject to direct criticism or not, any anthropological idea of
an unproblematic relation between culture and self would have no doubt
eroded on its own. The relationship between cultural forms and personhood is no longer taken for granted, and as a result subjectivity is both
more signicant and more interesting. Persons are now recognized to
have perspectives on their cultural worlds that are likely to differ by
gender and other markers of social position.18 They are no longer considered to be unproblematically shaped by rituals and other key events of an
enculturation that solely reects cultural ideology. If public institutions
and the rituals they stage are important to, but not determinant of,
subjectivity, then researchers need to address personhood directly. If people are not seen simply as living enactments of core cultural themes, then
anthropologists are free, indeed pushed, to ask a broader range of questions about experience and subjectivity and the role of cultural resources
in the constitution of this experience.
New ethnographers of personhood have begun to ask such questions.19 They share some implicit or explicit components of a theory of
the relationship between culture and self. All of them emphasize specic
cultural discourses and practices. All of them show interest in the plurality of sites of the self. They do not regard these discourses and practices
as indicators of essential features or themes of the cultures in which they
32
am
Co
py
work. Rather, and these particulars are important, they treat these discourses as the media around which socially and historically positioned
persons construct their subjectivities in practice. The critical developments of the past twenty-ve years not only have revived anthropological interest in culture and self but also have fundamentally shifted anthropologists view of the relationship between the two. The new
ethnographers of personhood describe how specic, often socially powerful, cultural discourses and practices both position people and provide
them with the resources to respond to the problematic situations in
which they nd themselves.
Subjectivity, in these works, is seen to be developing at an interface,
within the interplay between the social and embodied sources of the self,
in what might be called the self-in-practice or, to use a label inspired by
Bakhtin, the authoring self (see Chapter 8). This self-in-practice occupies the interface between intimate discourses, inner speaking, and bodily practices formed in the past and the discourses and practices to which
people are exposed, willingly or not, in the present.20 It authors or orchestrates the products of these sites of self. These ethnographies sidestep a possible impasse between social constructivist and embodied
views of the self, and see instead a mediation between thema mediation produced, in part, by a developing self-in-practice.
A Next Step
Ex
This view of self and identity emerging from ethnographic studies speaks
to the critical concerns of our postmodern disciplines. Our purpose in
this book is to extend, through concepts drawn from Bakhtin and Vygotsky, the lessons learned from anthropological encounters with self and
identity to a cultural studies of the person. Our theoretical path diverges
from, though it may ultimately be compatible with, other efforts in cultural studies.
Hall (1996) provides a state-of-the-art account of efforts to overcome
a problem left by Foucaults success in killing off the Western concept of
the integral, originary subject. Foucault persuasively detailed the historical processes of subjectication by discursive practices, and the politics of exclusion which all such subjectication appears to entail (Hall
1996: 2). But he died early in the process of correcting an over-emphasis
on the determinants of the subject. Subjects, especially in his earlier
writings, were left with no surplus (Harvey 1996) by which to escape
33
Ex
am
Co
py
34
Ex
am
Co
py
postrevolutionary Russia and matured there in the late 1920s and 1930s.
The sociohistorical school of psychology was the product of an earlier
critical disruption. Its members took as their task the creation of a psychology founded upon Marxs historical, social, and economic precepts, a
psychology that would nonetheless give proper attention to the (always
relative) autonomy of personal, cognitive, affective, and conative phenomena. Vygotsky and his followers were not alone in their search for an
understanding of persons that took Marx into account. Among the many
philosophers, writers, artists, and human scientists who considered it,
Bakhtin and the friends who wrote with him (Voloshinov preeminently)
contributed one of the most signicant explorations of personhood
one that is socially and historically construed, yet creative. Although
they worked virtually contemporaneously, there is little evidence that the
two groups of theorists knew much of one another.22 Their similarities
are a testament to the shared problematics of the postrevolutionary intellectual milieu.
The period in Soviet history immediately following the 1917 Revolution was one of intense intellectual as well as social ferment. Utopian
conceptions of the New Men that must populate a new world arose
in many elds and ranged from the romantic and heroic to the scientistic and systematic. In the arts, cubism, futurism, even suprematism
sought to break the old forms of perception and replace them with newly
expressed and various understandings of the sensuous. Symbolists and
formalists debated the forms of literary expression proper to the new
order, weighing poetry against prose and the intuitive and spoken
against the structural and written. Philosophical schools and the sciences, both social and natural, strove to come to terms with a Marxist
tradition that had yet to solidify. And all these idioms and ideologies
were intended to inform the living world, the lives of people beyond the
rings of intellectual debate.
Marxs followers had never settled on a common understanding of
human beings apart from the necessities of political economy and revolutionary action. After a successful revolution, however, a new establishment awaited, one whose concerns no longer had to adhere to the
exigent but could (indeed must) expand to the horizons of the everyday.
Others have interpreted this move as a return to the broader, more philosophical concerns of the young Marx. But that work was little known,
and it was unnished in comparison to Kapital. An old problem re-
35
Semiotic Mediation
Co
py
mained, which we might now call one of social psychology. What was
the proper relation of the social realm to the psyche, to the interior life of
people? If Marx had said, in the theses on Feuerbach, that the human
essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual . . . in its
reality it is the ensemble of social relations, he had not said how this
ensemble was composed (Marx 1975). Vygotsky and his students, Bakhtin and his collaborators were among the many who attempted to meet
this problem (see Joravsky 1989; Luria 1979). In the remainder of this
chapter we will focus on the answers proposed by Vygotsky and the
sociohistorical school; the wonderful complications drawn by Bakhtin
and Voloshinov will meet fuller exposition in Chapter 8.
Ex
am
36
Ex
am
Co
py
37
Ex
am
Co
py
music to which one listens to change ones mood, a chart that one consults to know what to do next in a work routine. Repeated experience
with the tangible device may eventually become unnecessary, and its
function may be internalized (Vygotsky 1978; Wertsch 1985b). The
sign-image, that is, its representation within the inner speaking (and
more generally, inner activity) that constitutes whatever substance there
is to self-consciousness, comes to evoke the routine originally organized
in relation to the external sign. Finally, the process of self-training may
even be forgotten, and the evocation of control may become automatic
(see Hutchins 1986). Even the sign-image escapes notice, and the behavior becomes in a translation of Vygotskys Russian, fossilized.
Although Vygotsky stressed the construction of higher psychological
functions, such as purposive remembering, the idea of mediating devices is appropriate far beyond the domain of humans control over their
memory and even their problem-solving and inferencing. Luria (cited in
Cole 1985), for example, gives a case of the mediation of will, and
Vygotsky (1984: 379) discusses the development of a logic of emotion.
Through signs and words, children learn to talk about, compare, classify,
and thus manage their own emotions. These ideas inform more recent
studies of and popular notions about artices for modulating emotion.
Arlie Hochschild (1983) describes the training of ight attendants and
the devices they were taught to use to control their anger at obnoxious
passengers. They were taught to imagine that something traumatic had
happened in the passengers life, or to remind themselves that the passenger was behaving childishly because of his fear of ying. Hochschild
shows that these devices were carefully inculcated and continually reproduced in practice, under a regimen of training that was instituted and
maintained by the corporation but supported as well by a popular tradition of such means to self-control. So successful was this training that
many ight attendants began to lose any sense of their own anger, on or
off the job.
Another example could be taken from Spradleys account of urban
nomads in Seattle. Spradley (1970) describes a part of the nomad tradition that had to do with surviving incarceration. He details the degradation and brutality that urban nomads faced at the hands of the police,
and he recounts the nomads response, a way of organizing thoughts and
feelings that they taught one another so as to do easy time. Easy time
was a way of minimizing the effect of incarceration, a sign-routine medi-
38
py
am
Co
Semiotic mediation provides for the capacity that may be called symbolic
bootstrapping. One of the convincing points about this tool of agency,
this tool for gaining control over ones behavior, is its appropriate modesty. It is an indirect meansone modies ones environment with the
aim, but not the certainty, of affecting ones own behaviorand it requires a sustained effort. As Hochschild observed among the ight attendants, by relying rst upon training wheels of a symbolic sort, one can
learn to ignore aspects of situations to which one would have previously
responded.24 One can even, through similar processes, master ones history of alcohol addiction (see Chapter 4). But the process involves effort,
may not succeed, and, except for rather small-scale changes, is clearly
beyond the ability of any individual to accomplish alone. These tools of
agency are highly social in several senses: the symbols of mediation are
collectively produced, learned in practice, and remain distributed over
others for a long period of time.25
Ex
39
Ex
am
Co
py
freelyreminding us of the stimulus-response pairs of behaviorist psychology. Culture, for Leontiev, does not qualify as a third term because,
in its anthropological renderings, it simply becomes a reading, a conceptual guration, of the environment.27 Nor do psychodynamic processes count as a third term; they simply explain the complexities of
response formation in the person.
The third term Leontiev proposed to add indicates that people respond
to what they nd in the environment in the context of a historical,
socially and culturally constructed form of social (inter)action that he
called an activity. In the two-term accounts, persons passively encounter
things in the (culturally interpreted) environment to which they, for
psychodynamic or other reasons, are sensitive. Then they react. Activity
theory instead views people as actively engaged with the environment.
They are always in the ow of doing somethingthe something being
a historical, collectively dened, socially produced activityand it is
within this meaningful intent toward their surroundings that they respond to whatever they encounter in the environment. (Indeed, the fact
of an encounter with an environmental stimulus is itself mediated by
the activity.) Tomorrow they may be engaged in another activity in which
the same object, for example, will be used in a different way, if noticed at
all. Practice theory shares this understanding of people as actively engaged with their environments. Bourdieu (1977a) highlights the similarities between the two theories when he explicitly describes practice
as a third way to grasp social action, one that mediates between objectivism (environment) and subjectivism (person or group).28
One signicant entailment of the activity theory described by Leontiev
is the implied dialectic of person and environment within the context
of activity. The boundary between person and environment becomes less
denite, especially when viewed over time. Persons oriented toward
their surroundings by desire for food, for example, have that desire
shaped in relation to the food they encounter and become familiar with.
The desire is objectied or made more concrete through encounters with
possible objects that could satisfy it in the particular environment.
Bakhtins associate Voloshinov (1986) provides an even more important example of this process for our purposes because he addresses the
social aspects of the environment that affect the objectication of hunger.29 He made an extended argument that experiences, even of internal sensations such as hunger, are formed in and so bear the marks of
40
Co
py
social context (see Chapter 8). Utterances about ones hunger, even those
which never quite become public utterances, are shaped to the social
situation, and they in turn affect ones subjective sense of hunger. Hunger when one feels no right to request food from ones hosts is likely to
feel different from hunger when one is a customer in an expensive restaurant and the food has been inordinately delayed. There is, in each
instance, a microgenesis, a microdevelopment as the person goes from a
personal, subjective sense to its objectication, responding to and drawing upon past experience as well as the resources and demands of the
particular situation.30 The ultimate behaviorwhether an expression of
hunger, a solution to a problem, a climb up a house, or a work of artis
a product of the person-in-practice. This product, in turn, can become a
symbol or icon important in the mediation of future behavior. The process is one of heuristic development.
Ex
am
41
Ex
am
Co
py
42
py
Co
the realized capacity of people to act upon their world and not only to
know about or give personal or intersubjective signicance to it. That
capacity is the power of people to act purposively and reectively, in
more or less complex interrelationships with one another, to reiterate
and remake the world in which they live, in circumstances where they
may consider different courses of action possible and desirable, though
not necessarily from the same point of view.
Case Studies
Ex
am
Along with our theoretical discussions, we include case studies of identity in lived worlds: the constitution and interpretation of personal action in historically circumscribed, though never closed, venues of social
activity. We tell of romance at two universities, of drinking and not
drinking in a chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous, and of the treatment of
mental illness, all in the United States, and of gender relations in Nepal.
Participants in all these worlds undergo processes of heuristic development which result, for some, in identities: of self as a romantic type, as a
non-drinking alcoholic, as a manic-depressive or borderline, as an unjustly treated woman.
Hannerz (1983) describes various tools of identity, notably the mirror, whose importance he noted during his research among the Fulani of
Nigeria. His conception of identity indexes a general notion of oneself.
The tools of identity that we examine are those of particular lived worlds.
In Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, participants are coached to tell
their lives according to a format, a genre of story, that has been collectively developed from the beginnings of AA in the 1930s. These emblematic narratives become a major means of the symbolic bootstrapping that
43
Ex
am
Co
py
44
Ex
am
Co
py
45
Ex
am
Co
py
men. The positional aspects of perspective are often less symbolized, less
developed as explicit aspects of ones identity than narrativized aspects.
Thus, behavior that proclaims these socially dened entitlements may be
less susceptible to voluntary control.
Still, position is not fate. Cultural resources, including the activities
and landscapesthe gured worldsthat give meaning to peoples interaction, change historically in ways that are marked by the political
struggles and social valuation of their users. The particular inspiration
that we draw from the sociohistorical school is its attention to continuing
adjustment, reorganization, and movement. This continual development
contrasts with Bourdieus conception: for Bourdieu, the improvisations
that are characteristic of all social behavior make a difference to the
habitus of the next generation. That is, the forms of novel activity created
by a senior generation provide the experiential context in which their
children develop the habitus of the group. Such innovation has little
impact on the established habitus of the elders. For proponents of the
sociohistorical school, in contrast, improvisations make a difference for
the next moment of production.34
It is not impossible for people to gure and remake the conditions of
their lives. Bakhtin shows that, from the very fact that cultural resources
are indelibly marked by social position, people can reassert a point of
control through the rearrangement of cultural forms as evocations of
position (see Chapter 8). The equation of the means of expression and
social forcethe notion of voiceworks both ways. It positions persons
as it provides them with the tools to re-create their positions. The elds
of cultural production that circumscribe perspectives become, in Bakhtins handling, spaces of authoring.
Groups of women in Naudada joined together at the yearly festival of
Tij and produced songs that described and analyzed the sad and unfair
position of women in Nepali society (see Chapter 12). The women narrativized and symbolized their social positions in the family and in society,
and through the activity and around its productions they were developing both critical understandings of their position and new identities
related to their Tij groups. Small groups like these develop heuristically
as well.
In fact, we believe identity formation must be understood as the heuristic codevelopment of cultural media and forms of identity. In Chapter
11 we discuss the ways in which the development of courtly love in the
46
Ex
am
Co
py
eleventh and twelfth centuries, its activities (the courts of love), and its
songs envisioned not only new forms of association among men and
women but also new gures of possible selves-in-practice. The opening
of an originally specialized, nearly ritual, performative world into the
everydaya long transformationis part of what has made possible the
American world of romance that we studied in the 1970s and 1980s. We
also discuss Andersons (1983) imagined communities, the grounds of
modern nationalism, in that chapter.
Heuristic development results in persons whose history-in-person is
likely to have an agenda and momentum of its own. Persons do bring a
history to the presentan important aspect of which is usually an untidy compilation of perspectives, some developed into symbolized identities.35 Even in the face of powerful situational determinants, such as
inducements to drink among members of Alcoholics Anonymous, these
identities, especially when supported by others of like perspective, afford
some self-control and agency. Nonetheless persons remain susceptible to
the situational determinants of their reproduction, including the subject
positions foisted upon them. The process is a composite one of slow,
sometimes erratic, but continuous change. History-in-person collides
with combinations of circumstances that are by degree precedented and
unprecedented. The behaviors, the products of the moment, then become available as mediators to change oneself and others, and perhaps
even the gured worlds in which one acts. Culture and subject positions
are important components of the working of identity, but cultural production and heuristic development are the keys to its analysis.
II
Ex
am
Co
py
py
Co
am
Ex
Copyright 1998 The President and Fellows of Harvard College
Co
py
Figured Worlds
Ex
am
John Caughey (1984), among others, has remarked upon humans penchant to enter into imaginary worldsvia dreams, daydreams, or spectatorship (lms, sports events, reading). He sees the signicance of this as
twofold. By modeling possibilities, imaginary worlds can inspire new
actions; or, paradoxically, their alternative pleasures can encourage escape and a withdrawal from action. Benedict Anderson (1983) draws out
yet another signicance of human fantasy by understanding nationalism
as participation in an imagined community. Many of the activities that
engage human energy and interest have an imaginative component.
Figured worlds rest upon peoples abilities to form and be formed in
collectively realized as if realms. What if gender relations were dened
so that women had to worry about whether they were attractive? What
if, as in the Trobriand Islands described by Weiner (1976), bundles of
banana leaves were so important that older women spent much time and
energy assembling them?1 What if there were a world called academia,
where books were so signicant that people would sit for hours on end,
away from friends and family, writing them? People have the propensity
to be drawn to, recruited for, and formed in these worlds, and to become
active in and passionate about them. Peoples identities and agency are
formed dialectically and dialogically in these as if worlds.
Toward the end of his life, Vygotsky (1978) wrote a paper in which he
expanded his notion of childrens potential for development. In that
paper we see Vygotskys usual fascination with the ability of humans to
manipulate their worlds and themselves by means of symbols. In it he
analyzed young childrens play and their later abilities with games. Early
49
Copyright 1998 The President and Fellows of Harvard College
50
Ex
am
Co
py
Figured Worlds
51
Ex
am
Co
py
role in the game and its rules (Vygotsky 1978: 100). It is this competence that makes possible culturally constituted or gured worlds and,
consequently, the range of human institutions. Lee (1985) points out the
denite link between play worlds and institutional life. Fantasy and
game play serve as precursors to participation in an institutional life,
where individuals are treated as scholars, bosses, or at-risk children and
events such as the granting of tenure, a corporate raid, and the self-esteem of at-risk children are taken in all seriousness. But to see imagination extended so is simply to recognize that it pervades cultural life.
Under the rubric of culturally gured worlds or gured worlds we
include all those cultural realms peopled by characters from collective
imaginings: academia, the factory, crime, romance, environmental activism, games of Dungeons and Dragons, the mens house among the Mehinaku of Brazil (Gregor 1977). These are worlds made up of Geertzs
(1973b) webs of meaning. Figured worlds take shape within and grant
shape to the coproduction of activities, discourses, performances, and
artifacts. A gured world is peopled by the gures, characters, and types
who carry out its tasks and who also have styles of interacting within,
distinguishable perspectives on, and orientations toward it.
Consider the cultural world of Alcoholics Anonymous (explored in
Chapter 4). In AA meetings participants tell stories about their lives
before they joined the organization. They collect tokens for the periods
of time they have remained sober. They come to name themselves, and
often to see themselves, as alcoholics and not just drinkers. All these
elements of AA are meaningful in, relevant to, and valued (or not) in
relation to a frame of meaning, a virtual world, a world that has been
gured.
When Cain did her research the tokens used to mark length of sobriety were the same plastic chips sold for playing poker. In the world of AA
these chips were not won by holding a straight ush. Rather, they were
meaningfully revalued to a world where the stake, the thing at wager,
was staying sober; the chip became an emblem of a different achievement, another kind of success. On the stores shelf a poker chip is worth
little, but within the world of AA the signicance of a chip, color-coded
for length of time without a drink, is great. The difference between
picking up and not picking up a chip is, for some, the difference between
a good and a bad life.
Likewise, the stories that AA participants learn to tell, about their
52
Ex
am
Co
py
former lives and their current temptations, are revalued because they
signify experience and place in a world that differs from that of the
non-alcoholic. These life stories, too, take on the extended meanings
characteristic of play and are thus re-formed within the larger frame of
reference, the gured world of AA. They become the cultural resource
that mediates members identities as non-drinking alcoholics.
These socially generated, culturally gured worlds, many linguists
believe, are necessary for understanding the meaning of words. When
talking and acting, people assume that their words and behavior will be
interpreted according to a context of meaningas indexing or pointing
to a culturally gured world. Violations of this assumption cause confusion and prevarication. Fillmore (1975, 1982), a key gure in the development of frame semantics, asked his readers to consider the word
bachelor. Why is it confusing to ask if the Pope is a bachelor? After all,
a bachelor is an unmarried man and the Pope is an unmarried man. Yet
there is something peculiar about referring to the Pope as a bachelor. The
problem is that bachelor frames . . . a gured world in which prototypical events unfold: men marry at a certain age; marriages last for life; and
in such a world, a bachelor is a man who stays unmarried beyond the
usual age, thereby becoming eminently marriageable (Quinn and Holland 1987: 23). The Pope, under a vow of celibacy, is not a relevant
character in the cultural world of marriageof marriageable men, and of
not-yet-married bachelors. Asking if the Pope is a bachelor is akin to
trying to redeem ones poker chips for money at an AA meeting. The
questioner and the would-be redeemer have both mistaken the relevant
gured world.
By gured world, then, we mean a socially and culturally constructed realm of interpretation in which particular characters and actors
are recognized, signicance is assigned to certain acts, and particular
outcomes are valued over others. Each is a simplied world populated by
a set of agents (in the world of romance: attractive women, boyfriends,
lovers, ancs) who engage in a limited range of meaningful acts or
changes of state (irting with, falling in love with, dumping, having sex
with) as moved by a specic set of forces (attractiveness, love, lust).3
These collective as-if worlds are sociohistoric, contrived interpretations or imaginations that mediate behavior and so, from the perspective
of heuristic development, inform participants outlooks. The ability to
sense (see, hear, touch, taste, feel) the gured world becomes embodied
Figured Worlds
53
Cultural Means
Co
py
over time, through continual participation. One can, in the current state
of technology, put on a bulky headset with connections to computers,
television cameras, and data gloves, and enter into a virtual reality. A
gured world, too, is played out; a frame becomes a worlda space and
time established imaginativelythat one can come to sense after a process of experiencing, acting by virtue of its rules (see Shotter 1982). No
technology, no headset is necessary. Players become ever more familiar
with the happenings of a gured worldthe stories told in AA, for
exampleand learn to author their own and make them available to
other participants. By means of such appropriation, objectication, and
communication, the world itself is also reproduced, forming and reforming in the practices of its participants.
Ex
am
Figured worlds could also be called gurative, narrativized, or dramatized worlds. Figurative, according to Websters Third International Dictionary, means transferred in sense from literal or plain to abstract or
hypothetical; representing or represented by a gure. The production
and reproduction of gured worlds involves both abstraction of signicant regularities from everyday life into expectations about how particular types of events unfold and interpretation of the everyday according to these distillations of past experiences. A gured world is formed
and re-formed in relation to the everyday activities and events that ordain happenings within it. It is certainly not divorced from these happenings, but neither is it identical to the particulars of any one event. It is an
abstraction, an extraction carried out under guidance.4
Narrativized and dramatized convey the idea that many of the
elements of a world relate to one another in the form of a story or drama,
a standard plot against which narratives of unusual events are told.5
For example, Holland and Eisenhart (1990) and Holland and Skinner
(1987) found a taken-for-granted sequence of events in the world of
romance on two university campuses; we present it in Chapter 5.
Skinners studies in Naudada, a mixed-caste, predominantly Hindu
community in central Nepal, provide another example of a gured world
organized around a sort of narrative. For Naudadas women the gured
world of domestic relations was dominated by a narrativized account of
the life path of a good woman. This life path was set forth in the Hindu
54
py
moral and religious texts that were read in Naudada and explicated by
priests, and so had more of a prescriptive avor than the taken-forgranted sequence of romantic relations. Along this life path (Skinner
1990: 7377):
Co
Ex
am
Again the storyline was not prescriptive but was signicant as a backdrop for interpretation. The meaning of characters, acts, and events in
everyday life was gured against this storyline. Radi (widow), for example, was used as a general term of insult for women and girls of any
age, even very young girls. Its connotations were denitely and potently
negative because of its relation to the life path of a good woman: a widow
was a woman who had decisively departed from the course of the moral
narrative by outliving her husband.
The conceptual importance of gured worlds has been emphasized in
anthropology for some time. Hallowell (1955a) argued that individuals
live in worlds that are culturally dened and understand themselves in
relation to these worlds. In a classic article, The Self and Its Behavioral
Environment, he notes that, for those whose cultural world gives them
credence, ghosts and other nonmaterial beings have a psychological reality that denotes nothing about a persons sanity or insanityas it might
in a culture where such beings are considered gures of fantasy, imagination, and superstition. Shweder (1991) devotes much space to intentional worlds, a concept reminiscent of Hallowells behavioral environ-
Figured Worlds
55
Beyond Imagination
Co
py
ment. Quinn and Holland and other authors in their edited volume
(Holland and Quinn 1987) similarly write about simplied worlds,
taken-for-granted worlds that are culturally modeled.
Cultural schemas or cultural models are stereotypical distillates, generalizations from past experience that people make. They are akin to
what Crapanzano (1990), speaking about the processes that maintain
the self in continual change, calls arrestsrepresentations of self at a
particular time that people try to reassert, even under new conditions.6
According to the cognitive architecture currently theorized for them,
cultural models (conceptualizations of gured worlds) certainly may and
are likely to change (see DAndrade 1995; Quinn and Strauss 1994), but
here we emphasize gured worlds that have some durability; those that
are, for various reasons, reproduced socially. In such cases these culturalist perspectives offer an important grasp on lived worlds.
Ex
am
56
Ex
am
Co
py
worry: Will I die from the witchcraft I suspect has been worked upon
me? Do these people suspect that I am a witch? Am I suffering misfortune after misfortune because someone wishes me ill?
Another part of this uncertainty is the very multiplicity and partiality
of the gured worlds that hedge the interpretation of action. It is often
unclear which (or how many) gurations are instanced by interaction.
Was that persons intent gaze a sign of witchcraft directed at me, a mark
of interest in the color of my dress, or simply an accidental glance,
looking through me to the thought beyond? Was she (at this time, in
this place) acting as a witch, an admirer or critic, or an uninterested
bystander?
Favret-Saadas work dramatically exemplies the ways gured worlds
are encountered in day-to-day social activity. Her work, with its constructivist dimension, directs attention to the living of gured worlds
through practices and activities. Holland and Eisenhart (1990), in their
ethnographic study at American universities, found that women spent a
great deal of time, alone and together, in activities devoted to improving
their bodies and appearance. Motivations for these beautication practices were expressed via the discourse of romance. Attractiveness to men
was an important quality in the students world of romance. A womans
prestige derived largely from the treatment she received from men, and
that treatment was formative of and responsive to her attractiveness.
Attractiveness was, in Bourdieus terms, a symbolic capital of the eld.
The endless energy and hours spent on beautication made sense in such
a world.8
Activities as a meaningful context of action have been a traditional
theoretical concern of the sociohistorical school for some sixty or seventy years. Leontiev and many others have conceived peoples actions
and their individual development within the larger frame of a historically
assembled, socially and culturally constructed activity. These activities
(work, play, teaching are often the matters of interest in this literature)9
establish particular sets of roles, actors, institutions, settings, durations,
and organizational requirements (see Wertsch 1981; Engestrm 1990,
1992).
Drawing a link between identities and activities similar to the one we
propose, Lave and Wenger (1991) begin to explore the consequences of
self-development in and through activities. Lave and Wenger are concerned with situated learning in communities of practicethat is,
Figured Worlds
57
Ex
am
Co
py
with how newcomers are inducted into socially enduring and complex
activities. They conceive learning as simultaneously a form of association (situation), an act of recruitment, and a (re)constitution of the basis
for communities. They follow the learning of neophytes brought into
communities of practitioners who may tailor in Liberia, deliver babies
in the Yucatn, or navigate large vessels in the U.S. Navy. Communities
of practice recast the practices and productions of working groups as
power/knowledge (to use Foucaults term), that is, as knowledge which
cannot be divorced from position, and as position married to knowledge,
within social groups. Identities become important outcomes of participation in communities of practice in ways analogous to our notion that
identities are formed in the process of participating in activities organized by gured worlds.
Goodenough (1994) suggests that we should theorize culture in relation to activities. Peoples activitieseven within the small, isolated
communities, crisscrossed by multi-stranded social relations, so familiar
to ethnographersdemand and are organized around different sets of
situated understandings and expectations. There is, Goodenough concludes, no uniform, consistent, or coherent set of meaningsno culturethat applies equally in every activity. Goodenoughs notion of
activities is reminiscent of the concept dened by the sociohistoric
school, and it has inspired intriguing work on the development of consciousness (see Amit-Talai 1995).10 But the sociohistorical schools concept of activity remains more useful to us. Because of its roots in Marxian
analyses of capitalism and other historically specic modes of production, activity theory pays more attention to the articulation of activities
within larger systems of power and privilege.11 This embedding of activities is central to an understanding of gured worlds as well: as we shall
see in Chapter 7, the world of romance and attractiveness plays a prominent role in the production and reproduction of gender privilege in the
United States.
58
py
am
Co
Ex
Figured Worlds
59
Ex
am
Co
py
tively dened activities that make up the arts and the academy that relate
to what Weber (1978) would have called status.13 Had Bourdieu mediated his understanding through gured world instead of eld, he
would have told us more about the discourses of academia and the
cultural constructions that constituted the familiar aspects of academic
life: the taken-for-granted generic gures (professors, graduate students,
undergraduates, provosts, secretaries) and their generic actsboth such
formal tasks as giving tutorials, administering tests, ring, hiring, and
granting degrees, and the less formal stories of tenure granted, tenure
denied, and teaching responsibilities juggled against writing and scholarly researchas situated in a particular institution.14 He would have
more closely detailed the terms of academic discoursesuch as quality, originality, and brillianceas ways in which academics come to
evaluate their efforts, understand themselves, and interpret the positions
they hold in the academy.
In Homo Academicus Bourdieu directed his eld analysis less to these
day-to-day aspects of cultural guring than to social relations among the
more powerful and inuential players. He paid attention to the positions
of academic personages and institutions in the French educational hierarchy, the markers of position, the symbolic capital accruing to the scholars and institutions, and the cultural productions created by them.15
We learn much from Homo Academicus about the interrelations of scholars and institutions in France according to their relative prestige and
inuence; we learn much less about the day-to-day content of activity
and the ways positions of prestige play out locallyfor the vast number
of academics. Hence we miss, for French academics, the focus that
Favret-Saada provides for French witchcraft: the everyday construction
of actors.16
Although Bourdieus interests in Homo Academicus were directed toward the prominent men and women of the system, a eld analysis is
relevant to any gured world.17 Indeed, as we have said, lived worlds
are organized around positions of status and inuence (in the case of
American college students, attractiveness and prestige; in the case of the
Naudadans of Nepal, caste and wealth as well as gender) and the cultural
narratives that posit particular sorts of characters and their dealings with
one another (the loving boyfriend and the irt; the attentive therapist
and the recalcitrant borderline; the Naudadan husband who threatens
his wife by telling her he will bring another woman into the house).
60
Ex
am
Co
py
Figured Worlds
61
am
Co
py
Ex
62
Ex
am
Co
py
Figured Worlds
63
am
Co
py
Ex
64
Ex
am
Co
py
thoughts and feelings through artifacts. We learn how to control ourselves from the outside, so to speak (Vygotsky 1978); we learn how to
position ourselves for ourselves.
Social constructivists consider discourses principally as the means by
which power/knowledge (or some equivalent) inscribes bodies and
(thus) creates persons. Vygotsky conceived cultural artifacts as learned
within social interaction; they serve rst as interpsychic tools and only
afterwardwhen one takes them as meaningful for oneselfdo they
function on intimate terrain. Although Vygotsky and the other members
of the sociohistorical school sought to build a psychology in accordance
with Marxist thought, they emphasized a side of Marxs work that is
often forgotten these days: the possibilities for becoming, and the sense of
freedom so pervasive in the period immediately after the Revolution.
They paid most attention to humans potential to expand, rather than
limit, their abilities and horizons. Foucault (among others) would later
elaborate the controlling aspects of human artifacts, the inscriptions of
discourses and the impositions of discipline. The sociohistorical school,
initially at least, took the path of optimism, and explored the potential
for the liberation and expansion of human capacities that artifactual
mediation afforded. Its members mapped the routes of escape from the
tyranny of environmental stimuli (including, presumably, the stimuli of
the social environment).
Here we have a paradox. As Shepel (1995: 428) puts it: The accumulation and mastery of a cultural tool kit and its use in overcoming the
dependency on a particular culture is one of the basic contradictions of
human development. How does liberation from the particular determinationsthe entrapmentsof our cultural worlds come about through
the tools shaped in those worlds for their perpetuation? In our case
studies we follow this paradox and play out this contradiction. By creating and embracing an identity in the world of Alcoholics Anonymous,
the former drinker can achieve a modicum of control over his relation
to alcohol, but in so doing he learns a kind of discipline, a way of looking
and behaving that often condemns what his friends, and often his other
selves, would have him do. Through participation in the womens
groups that create songs envisioning a new world of gender relations in
Nepal, individual women nd a place to stand, a perspective on themselves and their lives not otherwise offered in the texts and rituals of
their daily lives. They achieve their standpoint, however, only by submit-
Figured Worlds
65
Ex
am
Co
py
ting themselves to another set of cultural forms that have their own
peculiar limitations and constraints (see Chapters 10 and 12).
The next two chapters concern the lived worlds of romance and Alcoholics Anonymous, and how people take form, building understandings
of themselves as agents, patients, and instruments24 in these gured
worlds. These understandingsthese identitiesare unstable, especially as people are rst inducted to a gured world, and they continue to
undergo heuristic development in concert with peoples acclimation to
new spheres of activity. They remain multiple, as peoples trajectories
through gured worlds neither take one path nor remain in the ambit of
one cultural space, one gured world. Nonetheless, identities constitute
an enduring and signicant aspect of history-in-person, history that is
brought to current situations. They are a pivotal element of the perspective that persons bring to the construal of new activities and even new
gured worlds.
Co
py
Personal Stories in
Alcoholics Anonymous
Ex
am
Consider a group of men and women who are becoming alcoholics, not
by drinking, but rather by learning not to drink. These individuals have
decided to stop drinking because they have come to understand that
alcohol is controlling their lives. The change they undergo is much
more than a change in behavior. It is a transformation of their identities,
from drinking non-alcoholics to non-drinking alcoholics, and it affects
how they view and act in the world. It requires not only a particular
understanding of the world but a new understanding of their selves and
their lives and a reinterpretation of their own pasts. They enter, or rather
are recruited to, a new gured world, a new frame of understanding. One
device in particular that helps one identify oneself in this world is the
telling of a particular sort of personal story.
The identity and interpretation at which these men and women arrive
are ones dened by the self-help group Alcoholics Anonymous.1 In this
sense AA has created a cultural world, albeit a limited one, which is its
institutional reason for being. AA has constructed a particular interpretation of what it means to be an alcoholic, what typical alcoholics are like,
and what kinds of incidents mark a typical alcoholics life. This cultural
knowledge about alcoholism and the alcoholic shared by members of AA
differs both from the cultural knowledge of alcoholism shared by those
outside of AA and from the self-understanding of most potential members before they enter AA. The self-understandings of the individuals
who join AA must come to reect and incorporate the knowledge organized within AAs gured world; cultural knowledge must become selfknowledge. For some, though not all, self-understanding is transformed.
66
Copyright 1998 The President and Fellows of Harvard College
67
Ex
am
Co
py
One symbolic device that helps mediate this transformation is the personal stories told by members of Alcoholics Anonymous.
In the culture of middle-class America drinking is ambivalently
viewed. In many contexts it is a marker of adulthood and a frequent part
of social interaction. But drinking too much or too often, or behaving
inappropriately while drinking, may place one in the stigmatized status
of problem drinker or alcoholic. No distinct line runs between social or normal drinker and problem drinker or alcoholic, and
different sectors of U.S. society do not agree on what these terms mean.
In the past alcoholism was widely interpreted as a defect of character
or moral weakness. To some extent this view persists (Robins 1980), but
since the early 1940s an interpretation of alcoholism as a disease has
largely replaced it. This reects the general Western trend toward medicalizing deviance (Conrad and Schneider 1980). Alternative interpretations are possible. Like the mentally retarded people Edgerton (1967)
describes, whose disorder is largely an inadequacy in social conduct, the
alcoholic fails to meet social obligations. Alcoholics are labeled alcoholic
by others when their behavior becomes problematic by normal standards, not on the basis of the volume of alcohol drunk or the frequency
of drunkenness. Alcoholism describes a tendency toward inappropriate, out-of-control behavior.
Nor is the deviance simply a quality of the acts or behaviors so labeled.
It is a consequence of the breaking of rules and sanctions created by a
group that is in a position of power, and that nds the behavior unsettling. Deviance is a matter of politics (Schur 1980). As MacAndrew and
Edgerton (1969) argue, drunken comportment is learned, and varies
cross-culturally. Americans drunkenness is a learned behavior and has
its appropriate and inappropriate forms. Alcoholics are a labeled group of
people who behave inappropriately after drinking alcohol.
There is disagreement on who should be categorized as a problem
drinker or alcoholic. A successful writer who nds she writes better with
a few drinks, a college student who only gets drunk on the weekends, a
businessman who drinks to loosen up in social situationsthese people
may not consider themselves alcoholics, but those around them may
consider them so. Certainly there is a signicant difference between
members of Alcoholics Anonymous and the urban nomads described by
Spradley in You Owe Yourself a Drunk (1970). Yet the people in both
groups are labeled alcoholics.
68
am
Co
py
Ex
69
Ex
am
Co
py
States and England drew an analogy between sin and illness in a program
of personal evangelism. Early AA members, including the founders, participated in Oxford Group meetings and were inuenced by the oral
tradition and terminology and the methods of personal contact. The
original medical model of alcoholism used by AA was borrowed from the
medical model of sin popular in the Oxford Groups. The original methods section of Alcoholics Anonymous (published in 1939) uses the words
illness, malady, and habit to describe alcoholism; the word disease appears only once, to describe alcoholism as a spiritual disease
(Peterson 1988: 5). Later, as the medicalized view of alcoholism as a
disease became popular, it spread back to AA from the medical profession (John Peterson, personal communication).
AA members are told that alcoholism is a progressive and incurable
disease that, if unchecked, is fatal. The drinking alcoholic is powerless
over alcohol, and out of control. Once one becomes an alcoholic, ones
whole life is centered around alcohol, and once the drinking alcoholic
takes one drink, she cannot resist the next, or the next . . . The disease
affects all areas of ones life, and evidence for alcoholism cannot be found
in any one symptom but rather in the life as a whole. The only way to
arrest the disease is to stop drinking completely, and since the alcoholic
is powerless to resist alcohol, the only way to do this is to turn ones life
and will over to a Higher Power. The individuals Higher Power may be
God, the AA group, or any other conception of something larger than
self. The surrender must be complete, and can only be accomplished
when the drinker is ready to stop drinking, when she admits not only
that she may have a problem with drinking but that she is powerless
over alcohol and that her life has become unmanageable (AA 1976).
For this reason the drinker must hit bottom before she can stop; it is
not enough that others want her to stop. The bottom is not directly
determined by how much one drinks, but by what alcohol has done in
ones life:
Whether or not you are an alcoholic is not determined by where you
drink, when you started drinking, how long youve been drinking, with
whom you drink, what, or even how much. The true test is in the
answer to this question: What has alcohol done to you? If it has affected
your relationships with your family, friends, former or present employers; if it has inuenced the way you schedule your days; if it has affected
your health; if it determines or affects your nondrinking moods or your
70
Ex
am
Co
py
71
Ex
am
Co
py
72
Co
py
am
Ex
73
Ex
am
Co
py
74
Ex
am
Co
py
75
Ex
am
Co
py
is a disease that can happen to anyone (AA 1967, 1968b), and he must
sensitize himself to the appropriate evidence for it. He must also see the
identity of AA alcoholic as a desirable one. As expressed in AA literature
and AA talk, the program cannot work unless a person wants to stop
drinking, and this change usually occurs when a person hits bottom.
Finally, the drinker must see the identity of AA alcoholic as one that is
possible for him to attain. Cain heard several members say that even after
they admitted that they had drinking problems and that AA was relevant
to them they still could not identify with AA oldtimers: They had their
lives so together, and I was so fucked up.
Personalization of the identity takes place as the initiate begins to
identify with AA members. Through comparing his life to theirs, he sees
that other members are like him and he is like them. As he becomes
involved in AA, he learns to introduce himself as an alcoholic every time
he speaks. The behaviors that mark progress in the AA program become
subjective mediating devices; they become means by which the new
member directs and evaluates his own behavior. At meetings he picks up
colored chips, amid applause, to mark the amount of time he has been
without a drink. If he has a slip and takes a drink, he must start over
with a white chip, or clean chip. He works his way through the Twelve
Steps that guide, and mark ones progress in, sober living. The identity of
alcoholic gains salience for him and takes a more central place in his
conception of himself.
He becomes emotionally attached to the identity of AA alcoholic as
he begins to care how others in the group perceive him. He comes to
understand himself as a non-drinking alcoholic, and to reinterpret his
past life as evidence. As he becomes an oldtimer in AA, he tells his
personal story to newcomers to help them identify themselves as alcoholics. As Schwartz and Merten argue that identity reconstitution in
sorority initiation takes place through the attaching and exorcizing of
negative identities, we argue that identity reconstitution in AA takes
place through reinterpretation of self and of ones life, and that the major
vehicle for this reinterpretation is the AA personal story.
As mentioned earlier, there are two important dimensions to the identity of AA alcoholic. The rst distinction AA makes is between alcoholic
and non-alcoholic, where alcoholic refers to a state that, once attained, is
not reversible. The second is between drinking and non-drinking, and
refers to a potentially controllable activity. Normal drinkers, in the
76
A Learned Form
Co
py
gured world of AA, can control their drinking, while alcoholic drinkers
cannot; in order to stop drinking, AA members must turn their will and
lives over to a Higher Power. Together these two dimensions divide
people into four types, one of which is the AA alcoholic identity. For
continuing membership in AA, one must qualify as an alcoholic, based
on ones past, and make a continued effort at not drinking. The normative AA identity requires a behaviornot drinkingthat is a negation of
the behavior that originally qualied one for membership. One of the
functions of the AA personal story is to establish both aspects of membership in an individual. This parallels Schwartz and Merten in that the
AA story serves to attach what has now become understood as negative
behaviorattributes of the active alcoholicto the member, but demonstrates that these are in the past. In their place it attaches the attributes of
the non-drinking alcoholic, as demonstrated in behaviors appropriate to
AA and involvement in AA activities. Not the least of these activities is
the telling of the personal story.
Ex
am
77
Ex
am
Co
py
Perhaps I might already be one (AA 1979c: 20). The role of the personal
story in helping others to identify is important because of the AA test for
alcoholism. Evidence is found not in how much you drink, or how often,
but in what alcohol has done to you (AA 1979b). The evidence for
alcoholism must be found in ones entire life, and the personal story
provides a prototypic alcoholic life for comparison with the potential
members own. Hearing AA stories, the drinking alcoholic thinks, Weve
done the same things. This person is like me, and so, Maybe I am an
alcoholic.
This aspect of personal stories accounts for their widespread telling
in AA. Alcoholics Anonymous (1976), the Big Book, rst published
in 1939, includes twenty-nine personal stories of some of AAs earliest
members, including Bill W. and Dr. Bob. These stories are prefaced by the
hope that many alcoholic men and women, desperately in need, will see
these pages, and we believe that it is only by fully disclosing ourselves
and our problems that they will be persuaded to say, Yes I am one of
them too; I must have this thing (29). This early use of personal stories
has been continued in much of the AA literature published since. Pamphlets written for specic audiences (young people, women, prison inmates, the elderly) devote considerable space to personal stories. Biographies of the cofounders and comic-book style publications are other
forms the AA story takes.
AA members tell personal stories formally in speakers meetings. In
this type of meeting, speakers are prearranged, and, other than a short
opening and closing, the meeting consists entirely of these tellings.
These meetings are the most likely meetings for newcomers to attend,
and often form the outsiders impression of what an AA meeting is like.
Less formally, members tell shortened versions of their stories at discussion meetings. Sometimes, for example, when a newcomer is present,
each oldtimer in the group will tell, in short form, how he or she got
into AA.
Another important context for telling personal stories is Twelfth Step
calls. When AA members talk to outsiders who may be alcoholics in a
one-to-one interaction, they are following the last of the Twelve Steps,
carrying the message to alcoholics who still suffer. When called, AA
members will meet with nonmembers who are having problems related
to drinking. Ideally, at these individual meetings, the member tells his
story, describes the AA program, tries to help the drinker see herself as an
78
am
Co
py
Ex
These instructions give an indication of the structure of the AA personal story. There is a general structure, in the form of a scenario in
which the decision to join AA is made. This general structure is what we
will call the AA story. Apparently the story was consciously developed
from the beginning as a vehicle for presenting an experience or person
with whom the prospect could identify. Interviews published in 1980
show that Dr. Bob and early group members experimented with various
explanations of alcoholismincluding an allergy explanation and an
analogy to diabetesand methods of attracting prospects to their program. Members of the emerging group worked together to perfect their
79
Ex
am
Co
py
Ex
am
Co
py
80
Ex
am
Co
py
81
82
py
Ex
am
Co
83
py
Ex
am
Co
84
Ex
am
Co
py
the learner, as they cooperatively perform the task. The teacher begins
with the skills the learner possesses, and builds on those, while taking
responsibility for the aspects of the task the learner has not yet mastered.
Over time the learner is given, and takes, responsibility for more of the
task. Scaffolding is derived from the developmental psychology of Vygotsky, most particularly from his notion of the zone of proximal development (see Chapter 8). The scaffold that the teacher has built diminishes, and the skills that had been inter-individual in the cooperative task
become intra-individual, personally produced and relied upon by the
learner (Greeneld 1984).
Scaffolding of AA members who are beginning to tell their stories
indicates that the AA identity is not natural or simple to develop. People
do not describe themselves as alcoholics and their lives as alcoholic
lives because this is natural and obvious; rather they learn to tell about
themselves and their lives in this way, and the process of learning can
take much effort and cooperation between the neophyte and other AA
members.
Scaffolding occurs as the newcomer begins to talk about his life. For
example, in discussion meetings the topic may be admitting you are
powerless, making amends, how to avoid the rst drink, or shared
experiences in dealing with common problems. Each person present
usually relates some incident or insight. One speaker follows another by
picking out certain pieces of what has previously been said, telling why it
was relevant to him, and elaborating on it with some episode of his own.
Sometimes a newcomer will say something that seems to parallel the
episodes or comments of others, but will give an interpretation of it that
is inappropriate according to AA beliefs. Sometimes the episode itself
will seem to have little to do with those others are telling. Usually, unless
the interpretation really runs counter to AA beliefs, the speaker is not
corrected. Rather, other speakers take the appropriate parts of the newcomers comments and build on them, giving parallel accounts with
different interpretations, or expanding on parts of their own stories that
are similar to parts of the newcomers story while ignoring the inappropriate parts of his story.
At one discussion meeting members traded stories of how they had
come to AA. A college athlete, a newcomer who had not yet quit drinking or using drugs, gave instrumental reasons for needing to quithe
had to undergo urine tests and would lose his athletic scholarship if
drugs were detected. This was an inappropriate reason, since AA stresses
85
Ex
am
Co
py
that you must see yourself as an alcoholic, and must want to quit for
yourself rather than for someone else. Most of the oldtimers who spoke
after the newcomer focused on how they had realized they had a problem
they couldnt control. Several of the stories had the themes of needing to
see yourself as like other members of AA and needing to see getting sober
as something desirable.
In another meeting Brad, who had just entered AA and had had his last
drink three days before, said that he would still do pot except that he
always drank when he did pot: Pot is not a problem; I can give it up
anytime. Steve, an oldtimer, said he had done a lot of different drugs
that he could give up anytime . . . as long as he replaced them with a new
drug. Mark said, I experimented with pot . . . for twenty years. The
implication of these comments was clearly that Brad was only kidding
himself. In this way, members point out appropriate interpretations as
they make jokes about their own past wrong interpretations. One night
Gary told this tale: One morning I woke up after a night of drinking,
and I thought Id had this bad dream about running into the side of a
bridge at 55 miles an hour. Then I went outside. Three inches off the side
of my car were gone. And I thought, Man, Ive got to stop driving.
Members try to reinforce the appropriate parts of a story rather than
point out the inappropriate. When called for, however, correction does
occur. If someone says something that directly contradicts the basic AA
propositions and interpretations, she will be called on it. Clair, who had
been in the program for some time, said, I thought I wasnt powerless
over anything. William interrupted her: You werent powerless over
anything? She answered, I thought I wasnt powerless over anything.
On another night Eugene, who was fairly new to the program, was
worried that he was about to lose his job because he believed his boss
had found out that he was an alcoholic living in a halfway house. Its not
going to do me any good to be sober and not have a job, Eugene said. I
dont want to be sober with ragged underwear. An oldtimer answered,
If youre drinking, your underwear will get pretty ragged anyway.
At times, correct and incorrect interpretations are contrasted explicitly, as in these comments during a discussion on honesty:
At least when I was drunk, and lying on the oor, if someone came by
and asked me, Hey, whats wrong with you? at least I could say, Im
drunk! I might say, Its that stinkin rotten gin that did it to me, but I
would say, Im drunk. Ive seen a lot of people who would be lying on
86
py
the oorand there arent that many reasons you would be thereand
if you asked them whats wrong, theyd tell you, Oh, Im just tired, just
resting. Theyd tell themselves that. They just cant be honest. You
dont see that kind of person get sober very often. At least if they can
say, Im drunk, they might be able to get sober.
Ex
am
Co
Sometimes members interpret newcomers lives, more or less explicitly, according to AA principles. Patricia, a nonmember, spoke to Hank
on the AA hotline and asked how she could know if she was an alcoholic. Hank brought her to a discussion meeting and suggested the topic
How we got into AA. Everyone gave an abbreviated personal story,
focusing on the things that had led them to see themselves as alcoholics
and to come to AA for help. After listening to these stories, Patricia
spoke. She said she didnt think she was an alcoholic, but she did have
a drinking problem. She often drank all day on weekends, and often
didnt remember those days. She said she drank a lot, sometimes lied
about the amount, and hid bottles. Sometimes she had blackouts. Her
boyfriend was concerned about how much she drank, and he had talked
her into contacting AA. Then she compared herself with her uncle, who
was an alcoholic, and with the other members of the discussion group
whose stories she had heard, and declared that she was not that bad:
she had never wrecked a car or had DUIs; she had never been hospitalized, or had deep depressions, so she didnt think she was an alcoholic.
While she was speaking no one interrupted, but after she had nished
several people spoke. Without actually telling her she was an alcoholic,
they pointed out that the stories they told were their own, not hers, and
the events they told about were not preconditions but symptoms. Gary,
an oldtimer, said that just because he had never been strung out in a
hospital like Elizabeth, he could not use that to say he was not an
alcoholic any more than Elizabeth could say she was not one because she
had never had DUIs as he had. You dont have to get all the way to the
bottom before you quit, Elizabeth told Patricia. The only requirement
for membership is a desire to stop drinking. At the end of the meeting
Patricia picked up her white chip, indicating her intention to stop drinking and start the AA program. As another characteristic response to this
form of denial, when newcomers state that they havent done something,
others will reply yet.
Personal stories, as AA recognizes, are important in helping some
87
Ex
am
Co
py
88
Ex
am
Co
py
The AA personal story is a cultural form that the teller learns to produce,
and the process transforms her self-understanding from that of a drinker
to that of an AA recovering alcoholic. The stories encode the guring
of alcoholism held by AA, and this guring organizes knowledge and
guides inferences. As we argue in Chapter 5, identication with the
world gured by a cultural model develops together with becoming an
actor in that world.4 As the newcomer learns to produce an AA story and
identies herself as an AA alcoholic, she comes to use the cultural model
to direct her present actions and self-understanding and to reinterpret
her past. The stories are tools for reinterpreting the past and putting the
self into the gured world of AA. That is, the stories are cultural mediating devices, similar to the Nepalese rituals and songs that mediate the
formation of gender identities (see Chapters 10 and 12).
In the course of my eldwork with AA, I (Carole Cain) heard stories
told in three settings: discussion meetings, speakers meetings, and interviews. In some cases I heard the same persons tell their personal stories,
or parts of them, in more than one settingin an interview and a discussion meeting, for example, or in a discussion meeting and a speakers
meeting. It became clear that there were regularities in the stories each
person told, even as they were adapted to the different settings. There
also seemed to be a relationship between the way the stories were told
and the extent to which the teller had made the AA identity and the AA
model of the alcoholic life his own. The longer a person had been in AA,
the closer his story was to the AA story structure. There were also markers incorporated into the stories that indicated a process of reinterpretation, continuing or complete.
Much of this section is based on stories collected during three interviews, although I occasionally refer to stories told in other settings. One
advantage of the interviews is that they were tape-recorded and I have
been able to work from transcriptions. Also, in the interviews the speakers clearly consented to my use of the information. Although AA members knew that I was attending meetings as part of my research, what was
said at those meetings was intended for other members, not for the
anthropologist, and much was sensitive in nature and private. I have
edited out some material that I felt would be inappropriate to include.5
Interviews were done with people I met through AA meetings, and
89
Ex
am
Co
py
consisted of three parts (see Cain 1991). In the part presented here I
asked for the individuals accounts of their drinking experiences.
Before analyzing the interviews I collected personal stories published
in AA literature: 29 from the Big Book (AA 1976) and 17 from two
pamphlets (AA 1968a, 1979c). For these 46 accounts I did a careful
analysis, for each paragraph noting main points, episodes and events
included, and propositions made about alcohol, self, and AA. I sketched
the overall structure of each story. I then did the same type of analysis
(by frame) for two ctional stories presented in comic-book style (AA
1967, 1968b). Taking these two very similar stories, which I concluded
were typical according to AA beliefs, as prototypes, and referring back
to the 46 published personal accounts, I abstracted a general AA story
structure. It included categories such as rst drink, negative effects
of drinking, progression of drinking, suggestion (by others) that
drinking may be a problem, denial, attempts to control drinking,
entering AA, giving AA an honest try, and becoming sober. After I
modied the structure to account for differences (for example, some
sequences may be repeated; some categories are optional), the variation
that remained could be accounted for as attempts to address specic
issues, the agendas of particular publications. All the personal stories in
the AA publication Young People and AA (1979) address the issue of
being a young alcoholic; all the stories in AA for the Woman (1968a)
address the issue of being a female alcoholic. The Big Book stories were
all longer than those in the pamphlets and generally addressed the issue
of religious or spiritual beliefs and AA (for more details about my analysis see Cain 1991).
I compared the stories I heard told in AA discussion and speakers
meetings with those in the literature, and found that they t the structure quite well, with two qualications. First, some of the stories in the
discussion meetings were short versionseither telescoped accounts of
a drinking history or pieces of a drinking history used to make a particular point. Second, at the four speakers meetings I attended, three of the
speakers told stories that closely followed the structure. The fourth story
had events, episodes, and interpretations clearly matching AA beliefs,
but the speaker did not present them in chronological order; rather he
told episodes illustrating various points about his drinking and life. His
interpretations and choice of events matched the AA model in all ways
except the order in which they were told.
90
Ex
am
Co
py
91
Ex
am
Co
py
I will say that, you know, all this time there is another life going on. And
this, I think, is important . . . A lot of time drinkin stories look like
theres nothin in life but drinkin, dont you see.
Neither Hanks nor Ellens narrative matched the AA story structure
perfectly, but both were very close. Both included a description of early
drinking (or, for Ellen, drug use), the progression, the negative effects,
others reactions, hitting bottom, getting into AA, and life since starting
AA. Interestingly, they did not say much about their rst contact with
AA, their impression of it, or their ability to identify with other members,
a theme prominent in many of the published personal stories. This may
be a result of differing agendas: the published stories have the purpose of
trying to convince the reader to identify with the teller; in the interview
situation this was not the purpose of the telling. But it may be that Hank
and Ellen have not incorporated this part of the AA story structure into
their own personal stories.
Andrew, the third AA member interviewed, seemed to have no such
drinking experience story. My questions prompted only short answers
about specic events rather than the progression of drinking that makes
up the AA story. He spoke of himself as an alcoholic, but did not seem to
understand this in AA terms. Alcoholism was not something he thought
of as affecting all areas of his life. Similarly, he did not consider AA
something he would have to remain in all the time, or for the rest of his
life, in order to stay sober. Rather, he viewed coming to AA meetings, or
into the program, as a measure to take when things got bad. AA was
where he went when he started to have DTs (delirium tremens).
Andrew seemed to understand the events of his life not the way other
AA members would, as a progression of drinking and negative effects
leading to a bottom, but rather as a series of unrelated points where
drinking was enough of a problem, based on its physical effects (DTs),
that he had to do something about it. After a thirty-minute interview, the
drinking history I had recorded resembled the sort of medical history
that a doctor might collect, rather than an AA story. Andrew had accepted the label of alcoholic as applying to himself, but he had not
accepted the identity of an AA alcoholic. He did not understand himself
this way, and he did not present his life as an AA life.
In addition to evidence that AA members learn to tell their lives in the
structure of the AA story, there are other indicators that they are reinterpreting their lives as they tell their stories. One of these is the incorpora-
92
py
tion of AA propositions into the stories. Propositions such as alcoholism is a progressive disease, the alcoholic drinker is out of control,
and to recover, the alcoholic drinker must admit that he is powerless
over alcohol appear in the narratives of Hank and Ellen.
Co
Hank: After my last drink, and coming back in, I realized that if I was
gonna live, and live comfortable, and live happily, that I was gonna have
to take the AA program, its directions, and live it . . . And it was rough
at rst . . . and so . . . I hadnt lived that way. The other two times that I
was in, you know, it was something like, you know, making my own
decisions and writing my own program. But this time, I decided that,
you know, I was gonna do it . . . that way. And, and part of it is realizing
that, you know, from the very beginning, that Im powerless over it, that
theres nothing I can do about my drinking . . .
Ellen: So, everyone says, you know, its a progressive disease. And I can see
the progression, how I went from bad to worse, whenever I try to relate my
story . . . I swear, from that day on, for the next two, almost three years,
I was high every day. And after about a month I realized that this is
something that I couldnt stop. Its getting out of hand, because I would
wake up in the morning . . . Id go to bed at night and Id make sure I
had the dope in the morning to get up with.
Ex
am
93
am
Co
py
never look for a job. Id just go out and get stoned. This quotation
reects a process that is recognized as necessary for progress in AA: that
of getting honest, or admitting that you have not been honest with
yourself or others previously. Well, they accused me of stealing money
from the cash register at that job I had. And I said, No I didnt. And they
kept, and then, and then it would start. The lady, my boss lady said, well
. . . you know, I just was real paranoid. I thought she thought I was
stealing money from her, or something. So I quit. I got . . . I told my
boyfriend that I couldnt take her telling me that I stole from her, cause I
didnt steal anything from her.
These two quotations show that Ellen has not yet arrived at a nished
version of her story. The second also reects another important aspect of
Ellens life. Two years before this interview she was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenicthe result, her doctors said, of her heavy drug use.
In this passage she interprets her actions as the result of her paranoid
thought system, although she seems unsure of this interpretation. The
quotation illustrates a process she is still going through of choosing
between two versions of events, posited within two different, if often
related, gured worlds.
Ellens and Hanks narratives also include verbal markers indicating
that reinterpretation of the past has occurred. Hanks is the most fully
reinterpreted life of the three interview narratives. He compares the way
he now understands his past behavior with the way he understood it at
the time.
I know now, what I have learned later, that within two years of having my
rst drink, that I had trouble with alcohol. I look back. I did not drink
like my peers. It affected me differently than others.
Ex
Oh, I was a very, very sick man, I know now, before anyone ever recommended treatment.
This was the rst time I went to having serious problems with it. Two or
three things . . . There was the separation, and then the other things.
You know, these things, Ive learned later, were perfectly normal. Divorce,
separate and divorce. And the other things were perfectly normal.
Well, like a lot of the other recovering alcoholics, and like some Ive heard
about, I wound up by my wife and myself getting back together. Oh,
94
py
Ellen has not reinterpreted all episodes she includes in her narrative as
fully as Hank has reinterpreted his. Her markers of reinterpretation take
the form of comparison of events in her life with events she has heard
other AA members tell.
Co
And it seems that to justify smoking dope and drinking, I would always
say something about my parents. Id say, like, My parents dont love
me, or They dont understand me, or something, So Im gonna go
get high. And that would get them. The other night I guess you heard
Mark . . . talking about, you know, he was bored and didnt have anything to do. I think I used anger a lot instead.
And then starts a big period in my life where I was just depressed. I
just was so depressed. And part of it, I was so depressed because Id
have periods where Id be totally . . . And this can happen with drinking, too. Ive heard a lot of people say, you know, like, they, the blackouts,
the insanity, that comes from a lot of drinking. About seeing hallucinations, and all that kind of thing. So its not just the drugs that you can do
that with.
am
Ex
I used to say that prostitution was one thing I had never done to get
money for drugs. But I realize now that I was prostituting myself to my
husband. He would call [after she had left him] and say he had cocaine.
Id be there.
The stories change over time as the understanding of oneself and ones
life changes. There seems to be a fairly strong relationship among the
extent to which the AA identity has been formed, the extent to which the
narrative of drinking experience resembles the AA story structure, and
the salience of the AA identity to the individual. Hank had been in AA by
95
Ex
am
Co
py
far the longest time, and the identity of AA alcoholic was very prominent
in his self-understanding: of 13 responses he gave to the question Who
am I? 6 (46 percent), including the rst 3, referred to his identity as
an alcoholic or his participation in AA:6 (1) I am a recovering alcoholic; (2) 14 years sober; (3) drinking historytwenty years or better; (10) spend quite a bit of time in AA service work; (12) love to
talk to school and university classes [about alcoholism and AA]; and
(13) man on AA hotline in my home (eight years). His other 7 responses referred to family and career.
Ellens responses to the question Who am I? indicated that she was
not as far along as Hank in the process of incorporating the AA identity
as a prominent self-understanding. Of 11 responses, 2 (18 percent) related directly to this identity, and these were within the rst four
responses: (3) exdrug addict; and (4) sober. Her other responses referred to social categories and personality traits, including (1) woman,
(2) mother, (9) bride, (5) social, (7) outgoing, and (8) people
pleaser.
In contrast, only one (5 percent) of Andrews 20 responses to the
question Who am I? related to the AA identity: (13) non-drinker.
The response preceding this was non-smoker. His rst response was
his full name. The remainder dealt mainly with work and avocations
(2) dishwasher, (3) composer, (4) performer, (5) cook, (18)
writerand with his current living situation and his dissatisfaction
with it: (7) product of divorce, (8) single, (9) under-employed,
(10) unhappy with living arrangement, (11) overweight, (14) disappointed with locale, (15) no children/wife, (20) alone. These
results support the conclusion that there is a relationship between the
prominence of the AA alcoholic identity and the extent to which the
narrative of drinking experience resembles the AA story structure.
Comparison of the stories told in various settings with one another
and with the published AA stories indicates that the form of ones personal story changes over time as one develops and becomes emotionally
attached to the AA identity. Ellens and Hanks interviews suggest that
these stories actually mediate self-understanding, by helping the tellers
learn to interpret their lives in the same way other alcoholics interpret
theirs. Episodes from ones life are grouped into a drinking experience
story, or drinking history, that resembles the AA story in structure. Ones
understanding of the self and the past changes as AA propositions and
96
py
Ex
am
Co
97
Ex
am
Co
py
Co
py
Ex
am
She took him to the prom . . . he was about 26 . . . he was with a whole
lot of girls, it wasnt like he was just talking to her . . . she really didnt
know what she was getting into. Americans often speak of romance as
though it were a natural and intrinsically motivating activity that most
people, by the time they reach a certain age, engage in at a reasonable
level of competence. In the quotation a young woman named Cylene
alludes to a much less common conception: that savoir faire in romantic
pursuits is learned and that the motivating force of romance may not
come about automatically, but may rather be formed in social life.
The larger issue here concerns how gured worlds come to engage
people, to shape and be shaped by their actions. Not only the skills and
competencies involved in cultural performances but also the meanings
and salience of such activities and the desire to participate in them vary
from person to person. As we saw in Chapter 4 with regard to Alcoholics
Anonymous, participants develop an identication with a gured world
in different degrees of engagement, and these levels of identity are
products of peoples social histories, lived as history-in-person. These
processes of identication are evident in the specialized world of AA and
also in the more widespread activities of romance and attraction.
In a study of college student life (see Holland and Eisenhart 1990) we
followed Cylene and twenty-two other women for a year and a half,
through three semesters. The study was designed to investigate how
womens peer groups affected their choice of career. As it turned out,
much of the womens time and energy, much of what they said in their
interviews, and much of what we observed in their peer activities had
98
Copyright 1998 The President and Fellows of Harvard College
99
Co
py
Ex
am
100
Ex
am
Co
py
101
py
wish to draw parallels between using drugs and being involved in romance, our research suggests that the compelling nature of romantic
pursuits comes about, or is constructed, in the process of learning the
gured world.
The Study
am
Co
Ex
At both Bradford and SU, social activities were usually related to the
conduct of romantic encounters and relationships. Going out with, or
seeing, friends of the opposite sex ranked high on the list of valued
activities, and places where one might meet new men and womenparties, mixers, or the local barswere favored locations. The women and
their friends spent a lot of time talking about potential romantic partners and their own and others cross-gender relationships. Attractivenessas validated by attention from a man or mencontributed in a
major way to a womans status in the peer system (Holland and Eisenhart
1990). The romantic sphere of life was especially important to the
women of SU. Those who were less successful at coursework than they
had expected began to emphasize romantic relationships even more than
102
am
Co
py
they once had. Relationships with women were subordinated to relationships with men; romantic relationships often interfered with relationships among women (Holland and Eisenhart 1990).
The themes of male/female relationships also dominated a vocabulary
that the students used to talk about one another. Women knew hundreds of words for types of men, such as jerks, jocks, cowboys,
frattybaggers, brains, pricks, and men knew hundreds for types of
women (Holland and Skinner 1987). And romance gured profoundly in
the semiotics of clothes and personal adornment.
An earlier study of the meaning of gender-marked terms and of descriptions of male/female encounters and relationships, also conducted
at SU, had suggested that student discourse about romantic and close
cross-gender friendships presupposed a cultural model or cultural narrative of how such relationships develop.2 To understand the students
talk one had to know what they took for granted about these relationships (Holland and Skinner 1987).
As with other gured worlds, the cultural models of romance posited a
simplied world populated by a set of agents (for example, attractive
women, boyfriends, lovers, ancs) who engage in a limited range of
important acts or state changes (irting with, falling in love with, dumping, having sex with) as moved by a specic set of forces (attractiveness,
love). When the young adults talked about their acquaintances, friends,
and (potential) romantic partners in terms of gender-marked types such
as hunks, jerks, Susie sororities, or dumb broads, they were
assuming that the talk would be understood in relation to a simplied
world of cross-gender relationships. The typical progress of events posited in this gured world follows this course:
Ex
103
py
The relationship provides intimacy for both the man and the woman.
The relationship validates the attractiveness of both the man and the
woman.
And it allows and accounts for some exceptions:
Co
Ex
am
Most of the hundreds of gender-marked terms the students used designate problematic types of men and womenproblematic in relation to
the taken-for-granted progress of male/female relations posited by the
cultural model. They are gures who cause such relations to go awry.
Jerk names a typical problematic man. Our informants described jerks
as insensitive and stupid. But they did not fully spell out why a jerk
was considered such a negative type or why women found jerks disgusting and irritating. The reason became clear when we considered the jerk
as a relevant character in the gured world. A jerk is a type of man who
is neither attractive nor sensitive to women. He cannot compensate for
his low prestige by treating a woman especially well. He is too out of it
to discern her special qualities and anticipate her desires. He cannot
gure out the things he could do to make her feel well treated. He may be
so insensitive that he cannot even tell she dislikes him. Because he cannot take a hint, he will not leave her alone, and thus he becomes more
and more irritating.3
Not only were the women expected to know these cultural assumptions about the usual romantic relationship and the many types who
populated the world of romance, they also were constantly exposed to
interpretations of their own behavior based upon this standard romantic
scenario. In short, life among women students at both universities was
dominated in large partboth socially and culturallyby romance. Social activities and relationships, including relationships between women,
often revolved around romantic encounters or around talk about romantic relationships. Status was accorded, especially for women, in relation
104
py
Ex
am
Co
In the peer situation, with its constant enactments of and talk about
romantic relationships, individual differences in expertise and involvement were obscured. Knowledgeability about the types of men and the
ways romantic relationships worked was more or less assumed. Furthermore, as romance was assumed to be a natural activity, a basic level of
competence in the conduct of relationships was presumed.
American culture does not generally treat romantic relationships as an
area of expertise. The women did not usually talk about romance and
romantic relationships as something at which one is good or bad, expert
or inexpert. Love and romance were often talked about fatalistically, as
something that happened to one, not something that one affected. Unsuccessful relationships were more often attributed to character aws,
luck, or mismatches of interests than to a lack of skill or savoir faire.
Nonetheless, some talk did turn upon questions of expertise and competence. The women sometimes saw themselves or others as having
made mistakes. They had a sense of romantic situations that they were
too inexperienced or too young to handle. They sometimes assessed
themselves and others as more or less procient at romantic activities.
Judging from the women in the study, this less often articulated view
was the more accurate one. The more common notion that everyone has
similar levels of competence in and involvement with romance did not
hold up. Some women were quite ambivalent about romance (southern
style) and had less-than-compelling images of themselves in romantic
relationships. And the women differed in their facility with romantic
situations. That is, they had been recruited to the gured world of romance, and they had rehearsed in the repertory of activities, the scripts,
of that world, but not all of them had rehearsed to the same level. They
differed both in their degree of involvement with the world of romance
and in their levels of expertise in conceiving and responding to romantic
situationsthat is, their skills as romantic actors and their feeling or
sense (Bourdieus sens pratique) for the game of romantic relations.
105
py
Ex
am
Co
106
am
Co
py
had trouble establishing the kind of relationships she wanted with men
at college. She also learned that a potential boyfriend from back home
did not feel equally attracted to her and was in fact involved with someone else. All her friends seemed to be having similarly unhappy romantic
experiences. Sandy also began to feel that she did not t in with the other
students at SU: In my hometown, I was pretty much respected in the
community and accepted for what I am, or was, in that community. [I
was] basically your nonconformist, and I dressed to suit me. But when I
came down here I . . . got the impression that here I was a sloppy little
girl and I didnt have any class or I didnt have any style.
She came to stress friendships more than she had before: Friendships
were . . . and probably still are one of the most important things to me.
They were important to me not so very much socially. They were important to me as a person . . . I pride myself in my friendships.
Sandy formed a special friendship with one woman, Leslie. Despite the
jealousy of other friends and the admonitions of her parents, who felt she
was not availing herself of all the options at college, Sandy pursued her
friendship with Leslie: Our friendship is terric . . . I just would like to
spend more time . . . its all been crammed into one semester . . . theres
probably not gonna be another time in my life when I can just sit down
and just be friends.
Sandy came to devote all her free time to Leslie. She had begun her
freshman year with a professed interest in romantic relationships with
men, but had dropped that interest altogether. Such romantic attachments became markedly less salient for her, and her identity as an attractive woman in the world of romance, as culturally construed, became
unimportant.
Ex
107
py
Co
And I sits in front . . . of the class, and my teacher says, Whats this?
Whats this? Della, wheres she at? And I just sat there looking at him
cause he looked dumb looking around me . . . and he said, Oh, theres
Della. He looked my legs up and down, up and down, and the whole
class [was] looking at him. He said, Oh, oh, I see. I see, Della, I see.
Oh, oh. . . . I was so embarrassed; the whole class was looking at me.
Ex
am
108
Ex
am
Co
py
109
Ex
am
Co
py
110
Ex
am
Co
py
viewer: But 30 years old, thats old. I mean Im 18 years old. I dont want
to go out with someone whos 30. Its not that bad butshucks, I dont
want to go out with anybody but Howard. Hes worth the wait.7
Although she was less ambivalent than Susan, Natalie also seemed to
participate only half-heartedly in activities where one might meet potential romantic partners. Natalie did attend many parties and mixers but
seemingly only for appearances sake. As she presented herself in the
interviews, Natalie was much less involved in romantic endeavors than
most of the other women, and much more invested in her schoolwork.
She consistently talked not about boyfriends but about her schoolwork
and her family. She appeared to be little identied with the world of
romance. Her childhood vision of herself as a romantic partner (described earlier) had largely disintegrated as she watched her sisters marital troubles. She spoke positively of becoming, at some future time,
romantically involved with a man, but her vision of this future relationship was vague and without detail.
As these cases suggest, although others continually cast the women as
romantic actors, their involvement with the world of romance varied.
Some resisted being identied as romantic participants; some opposed
parts of the views of romance they associated with peers; some devised
strategies for avoiding or circumscribing their romantic experiences; and
many indicated that their feelings were at odds with the way they were
acting out a relationship.
To reiterate, the women we studied were not equally involved with the
world of romance, and the components of their involvementsalience
and identicationproved to be interrelated. Talk about men, focus on
men, and orientation toward romantic relationships correlated positively
with how much the women talked about and treated themselves as actors in the world of romance. Cylene, Natalie, and Susan, in their different ways, were less involved in their romantic activities than many of the
other women. Although they continued to participate, their comments
conveyed a sense of distance. Correspondingly, they expressed less concern about romance in the interviews than women like Karla, who did
identify with the world of romance and for whom romantic relationships and activities remained salient. The womens individual social situations and histories inuenced their varying degrees of recruitment to
this gured world.
The world of romance is a powerful element of the cultural life of
111
Co
py
college students, but, like any other frame of activity, it subsists in relation to other gured worlds. All such worlds are subject to social identications, that is, associated with the people who conventionally participate in them, and these people in turn are subject to the social differentia
of rank and prestigeclass, gender, race, and any number of more local
divisions of communitiesthat affect the evaluation, and thus the persuasiveness and authority, of the spheres they populate. This complex of
social and cultural inuence is realized personally, as in Susans case,
where a predisposition against socialites colored her relations to classmates she identied with the romantic world, and hence her vision of
herself in that world. Only by moving between the institutional and the
intimate, between history in its usual sense and history-in-person, can
we do justice to social life. It is this same analytic movement that captures psychic life, because the two aspects are, according to Vygotsky and
Bakhtin, transmutable and indissolubly related.
Ex
am
112
Ex
am
Co
py
To illustrate getting the upper hand, Karen, a student at SU, described her behavior toward Hal, a man she had just met. She was trying
to convince him that she was attractivepossibly more attractive than
he was. A woman who is less attractive than a man she goes out with,
according to the conventions of the gured world, compensates by settling for less attentive and sensitive treatment and by allowing the relationship to become physically intimate faster than she might wish. If she
is more attractive than the man, he compensates by being especially
sensitive and attentive to her. Karen tried to get the upper hand by
convincing Hal that other men were interested in her. She tried to give
him the impression that she was dating other men, that she had a boyfriend back home, and that she had a full social calendar.
For Rosalind, a student at Bradford, putting one man up front meant
playing up her involvement with only one man. Romantic relationships
at Bradford were complicated by the need to maintain integrity and
self-control. One lost integrity and control if information about ones
emotional investments became known to those who might use it to
manipulate or interfere with ones relationships (Holland and Eisenhart
1990). Rosalinds idea was to mask the full range of her involvements by
emphasizing one man as her primary romantic interest, thereby deecting attention from all others.
Both getting the upper hand and keeping one man up front were
strategies for achieving the valued outcomes of romantic involvements
while avoiding the bad. These strategies were ones the women themselves had improvised or decided to use and could describe without
much trouble.
Susan gave a quite different impression. During the rst year and a half
of her college career, she talked about gender relations in a variety of
ways, most of which could be traced to her friends. Susan, like many new
students, was seeking out a new group of friends. She struck up friendships with women who pursued a variety of lifestyles and orientations
and had quite different ways of talking about men and gender relations.
In the interviews she sometimes talked about her friends relationships in
terms that we knew were the same terms her friends used. Lee, a friend
of Susans, was having to fend off sexual advances from the owners of the
restaurant where she worked. Susan said that a guy at the caf had
pinched Lee on the buns and told her to loosen up. In another description of the same incident, Susan said that a Greek was messing with her
113
Ex
am
Co
py
[Lee]. Buns and messing with her were not the kind of words that
Susan used in other interviews to describe similar situations.
For instance, Susan described her friend Patricias relationships as being open or not open: It seems really good, the relationship they
have, because they talk a whole lot, and its a lot more open [than the]
relationship that she had with George, as far as saying what she wants
and feels. The openness of Lees relationships was not something
Susan talked about, presumably because Lee did not talk about them in
those terms.
Susan used euphemisms to talk about sex, a topic she seemed not to
discuss with her friends. For example, she said she had learned that a
friend (and potential boyfriend) was homosexual and that she was
glad not to have to worry about that with him anymore. Knowing
Patricia and some of Susans other friends, we doubted that any of them
would have referred to sex as that.
Susan also seemed willing to be swayed by other peoples arguments
about her. She described a situation in which an older man was trying
to persuade her to go out with him. The man had called Susans dorm in
search of a woman who no longer lived there. Susan answered the phone.
They began to talk and he asked her out. She put him off rst by saying
that she had homework and then by telling him she had a boyfriend
back homeHoward. The man was not so easily discouraged. As they
continued to talk, Susan admitted to going out with someone other than
Howard. The man retorted that if she went out with other people then
she could go out with him. He almost had her persuaded. In her next
interview Susan debated going out with him, although she eventually
returned to her boyfriend-back-home position. Still she said, But I
guess I should meet him, you know, he seems like a pretty interesting
person to meet.
By the end of the study Susan had settled upon one group as her
primary set of friends, and her talk about men and gender relations had
begun to conform to the way this group talked about such relationships.
Susans motivation to participate in romance, as well as her words,
seemed to be initially imparted by her friends. She did not nd the
culturally dened motives for romantic relationshipsprestige and intimacysufciently compelling to overcome her discomfort with romantic encounters. And, as mentioned earlier, she disputed whether one of
the motivesprestigewas a proper motive for relationships.8
114
Ex
am
Co
py
Nonetheless, in her sophomore year, Susan began to look for a boyfriend in earnest. Her efforts were spurred by the desire to participate
in the same activities and talk that her friends did. She identied with
them and their romantic practices. The following passage indicates the
difculty she had in her search and the support supplied by her friends.
She had just said she wanted to nd a boyfriend, and the interviewer had
asked her how one goes about it: You just scope out the crowd rst . . .
see, I found this guy that Im interested in . . . But I never see this guy so
that makes it difcult . . . I get all nervous and paranoid so I cant ever
talk to him. Its pretty funny, all my friends are like: Go talk to the guy,
Susan. Lets go talk to him. I just cant.
Follow-up interviews, especially one conducted in 1987, showed that
Susan had gained condence in the world of romance and spoke more
positively of her romantic experiences. But in 1980 her engagement with
the gured world seemed to be borrowed from her friends.
The women varied not only in their facility with ways of talkingand
presumably thinkingabout romance but also in the breadth of their
overviews of romantic relationships. Susan answered the interviewers
question about nding a boyfriend by outlining small-scale, step-by-step
procedures that one could follow at a mixer or a party. In contrast,
Karens and Rosalinds strategiesgetting the upper hand and keeping
one man up frontpaid attention to larger issues.
Paula, a woman at SU, became annoyed at starting relationships with
men she met at parties only to nd that they were also going out with her
friends. After several such experiences, she decided that meeting men at
parties did not work. In contrast, Aleisha, a woman at Bradford, who was
having similar trouble with the men she was meeting, decided that the
men behaved as they did because the women outnumbered the men at
Bradford. Because they were in demand, she thought, the men became
arrogant and expected more from the women than they were entitled to:
At this school, its about six girls to one guy . . . so the ugly [guys] . . .
think they look like heaven and will try to [talk to you] all the time. Its
really sick . . . Some of these guys have the cutest girlfriends, and I dont
know how they got them . . . He must have the money. Thats the reason
why an ugly guy could get a fairly decent looking girl. He has one of
two things: a car or hes got money . . . And most of the guys here that
look good, theyre real dumb and . . . as far as holding a conversation,
115
just forget it; Id rather talk to a wall . . . But with so many girls to one
guy, he gonna get somebody regardless of how he act.
Ex
am
Co
py
116
Ex
am
Co
py
117
Ex
am
Co
py
He too proposes ve stages: (1) novice, (2) advanced beginner, (3) competency, (4) prociency, and (5) expertise. He denies the usual idea that
expertise develops through the formulation of more and more sophisticated rules or propositions from which inferences are more and more
rapidly drawn. Instead he argues that it is primarily novices and advanced beginnersnot expertswho rely upon rules. Those who advance further form a more comprehensive, three-dimensional understanding of the cultural system, be it a game such as chess, a
sensorimotor skill such as driving, or a conventionalized, culturally interpreted system of relationships such as romance.
In the novice and advanced beginner stages, the individuals knowledge is mediated by (organized around) rules and maxims. These rules,
which the learner has probably heard from others, address elements or
aspects of the situation. They are like the steps in step-by-step recipes for
winning the game, driving the car, or nding a boyfriend. Susans rules
about scoping out the crowd come to mind.
With competency, the various elements of the situation become organized into a gestalt. The individual learns to think in terms of broader
components of the overall situation. Karens concept of getting the upper hand in her relationship with Hal is an example of such a component.
Dreyfuss description recalls Vygotskys understandings of learning. In
the early stages of learning, cultural artifacts, whether objects, words, or
gures, serve as obvious mediators of peoples activity. We count our
ngers, glance at diagrams, and recite rules to ourselves. After practice
(and for the young, a degree of maturation), however, these means of
mediation are taken into inner activity; words become inner speaking,
and gures become forms of the imagination. We no longer need the
obvious, external form, relying instead on inner means that we can reproduce at will. As our experience with the activity grows ever greater, as
we grow in expertise, another change occurs. This Vygotsky called fossilization. The various parts or steps that we once learned as recognizable elements, and the cultural forms that mediated their learning even
within inner speaking and imagination, lose their separability. The process, that is, the production of activity, falls from awareness, and all that is
left is its product. We simply do something, no longer thinking how
we do it.9
Dreyfuss explanation helps us graduate this process of fossilization
118
Ex
am
Co
py
119
tive or goal, feels responsible for, and thus emotionally involved in, the
result of his choice. (1984: 30)
Co
py
am
The competent performer, gripped by the situation that his decision has
produced, experiences and therefore remembers the situation not only
as foreground and background elements but also as senses of opportunity, risk, expectation, threat, etc. These gripping holistic memories
cannot guide the competent performer since he fails to include them
when he reects on problematic situations as a detached observer . . .
however, these memories become the basis of the competent performers next advance in skill. (1984: 30)
Ex
120
Ex
am
Co
py
121
py
the point where the gured world in which one has been acting according to the directions of others becomes a world that one uses to understand and organize aspects of ones self and at least some of ones own
feelings and thoughts (see Quinn and Holland 1987).
Ex
am
Co
Our study of young womens differential recruitment to and personalization of the gured world of romance revealed processes through which
romanceas culturally construed in the southeastern United States
became (or did not become) compelling. The larger issues concern the
directive force of cultural worlds and what the process of developing a
self in a cultural world reveals about the motivating force of such gured
worlds. The women in the study belied the commonsense notions that
romance is naturally compelling, naturally salient, and an area in which
competence is readily attained when one reaches a certain age. The commonsense notions imply a homogeneity of interest and competence that
we did not nd. The women varied in their expertise with romantic
relationships and their interest in romantic activities. Furthermore, the
commonsense notions underplay the pivotal signicance of social intercourse in the formation of romantic interests and skills.
A close look at the womens courses in the world of romance suggests
that savoir faire, salience, and identication with romance codevelop in a
process that is integrally connected to social context. In accord with
DAndrades (1992) point that cultural models (gured worlds) generate
goals rather than provide a means to satisfy preexisting ones, we found
that beginners may not know the assumed motives for romantic activityprestige and intimacyor may not nd them especially enticing.
Their knowledge of the conduct of romantic relationships may be rather
piecemeal, their overviews of romantic situations rather vague, their
responses to romantic situations rather labored, and they may not have
developed any engaging visions of themselves as participants in the
gured world described by the cultural system.
For the women we studied, the cultural interpretation of romance
became salient and compelling as their expertise with romantic relationships increased and as they came to form an engaging interpretation of
themselves in the world of romance. Women who were vague and unclear, or resistant to envisioning themselves in the world of romance,
122
Ex
am
Co
py
were the ones who remained less expert and who found romance relatively unimportant in their lives. Expert women were those who clearly
identied with the world and for whom romance was highly salient.
Ethnographic case studies such as this one and Beckers (1963) make
it clear that the social-interactional context of learning must be considered in any account of the formation of personal engagements. In our
research the ubiquitous presence of peersas participants in romantic
relationships and talk about them, as coaches and motivators, and as
targets of oppositionwas marked. If the women were not all expert
enough or engaged enough in the system of romance to nd it compelling in and of itself, they were all propelled into the activities by the
urgings of others. Further, those who resisted, rebelled, and did not form
identications with the romantic world did so, in part, in reaction to
their peers.
If we are right that expertise, salience, and identication codevelop in
an interrelated process, then descriptions of cultural worlds must become even more complicated than they are now. The manner of presenting the content of a cultural worldas if fully grasped by an expertimplies a level of savoir faire, a level of salience, and a level of identication
that may apply only to a small subset of the people who are presumably
participants in that world. The description may falsely imply a homogeneity of expertise, salience, and identication, as well as a homogeneity
of content.
Unexamined assumptions of homogeneity are a problem not so much
because they may be unjustied according to scientic canons as because
they permit inattention to the social distribution of cultural knowledge
and its role in power relations. Assumptions of homogeneity deect
attention from the social conict, the social symbolism of knowledge,
and individual appropriation and individual resistance, which are important even in an everyday activity like romance. Expertise with romance,
the salience of romantic activities, and the formation of a view of oneself
in the world of romance codevelop in a process that occurs within and is
sensitive to the social-interactional context. Thus the directive force of
romanceits compelling natureintegrally depends upon the realized
world of social position, of hierarchy and power, as well as upon cultural forces.
III
Ex
am
Co
py
py
Co
am
Ex
Copyright 1998 The President and Fellows of Harvard College
Co
py
Positional Identities
Ex
am
126
am
Co
py
All three girls were upset about this scolding. Muna, one of the three,
said: We hadnt done anything. I cant gure out why they made such a
scandal out of it . . . I felt like crying. I couldnt retaliate. I do not do such
things. I thought, who was she to tell someone like my mother such
things? We did not get angry because we had not done anything wrong.
Thats why I felt bad and wanted to cry.
On another day, Shanta, Tila Kumaris six-year-old daughter, was berated because she ventured into an activity to which she had no right.
Shanta was in the eld where her older brother was plowing. As he
steered the oxen past her, she reached out playfully and touched the
plow. Immediately her brother began to hit and rebuke her. Her father
and other brothers ran from the house to join in the scolding and beating, and her father told her it was a sin for a girl to touch a plow and
threatened to beat her severely if she ever touched it again. Shanta cried
and trembled for hours. When asked about the incident several weeks
later, she remembered it well, repeating her fathers words and promising
never again to touch the plow. Although Shanta did not understand the
wider moral universe in which her act was dened as a sin, she did learn
in a dramatic way that, because she was a girl, she was restricted from
acts that her brothers could freely perform.
Ex
Shanta and the three girls had become embroiled in incidents in which
their activity was constrained; they had encountered rebuffs to their
freedom of movement and freedom of action, limitations of what we will
call their social position. Others treated their actions as claims to social
positions, positions that, on account of gender in Shantas case and perhaps of relative caste position in the girls case, they were denied. In Tila
Kumaris eyes Muna and the other girls were appropriate targets for
demeaning. By the acts she suspected they had committedentering her
yard and taking her fruitthey had claimed positions to which they
were not entitled. The same fault could be found in Shantas innocent
intrusion into the male domain of the plow.
Sociolinguistics has long made much of the socially constitutive import of language choice (see Gumperz and Hymes 1972). Ones choices
of dialect, register, pronouns, and genre are not socially neutral. Such
decisions partake of powerful systems that index claims to the social
Positional Identities
127
Ex
am
Co
py
128
Ex
am
Co
py
position in a lived world: that is, depending on the others present, of her
greater or lesser access to spaces, activities, genres, and, through those
genres, authoritative voices, or any voice at all.
Bourdieu (1977b) makes some useful observations about the way the
phenomenon that we are labeling positional identity manifests in different social situations. Here he extends his notion of habitus to speaking,
to encompass ones sense of the value that is likely to be attributed to
what one has to say in a particular situation. Bourdieu acknowledges, as
did Bakhtin (1986), speakers awareness of the differential social valuing
of languages, genres, and styles of speaking, and he emphasizes the
habitual, out-of-awareness assessments one makes before and during
conversation: judgments of the linguistic forms that are likely to be
valued, of ones command over those linguistic resources, and of the
social privilege (or lack thereof) that a person of ones relative position
has to employ such resources. The assessment reveals itself in the way
speech is marked, leading the speaker to strained, self-conscious, correct speech or to effortless, unselfconscious speech; to comfort or to
discomfort; to voice or to silence.2
We have already drawn an imperfect but helpful analogy between the
two aspects of identity we are trying to distinguish and two aspects of
linguistic utterances. Figurative identities are likened to propositionality,
to the referential, semantic facet of speech; relational identities are likened to indexicality, to the pragmatic facet (see Irvine 1989). The import
of a particular linguistic element, determined by its relationships with a
system of other linguistic elements, is different from the import of the
element dened in relation to its social situation of use. Understanding
the difference between the meanings of mother and father is not the
same as understanding the difference between the social relations indexed by calling the same person Pop rather than Daddy or Father.
Likewise, understanding and identifying with the narrativized positions that allude to ones caste, as portrayed in some Hindu religious
texts, is quite different from understanding and identifying with the
indices of privilege, power, and entitlement that mark the relation of a
Bahun to a Damai in NaudadaTila Kumari to Munaor the position of
Shanta, a girl, vis--vis her brothers. Put perhaps too simply, gurative
identities are about signs that evoke storylines or plots among generic
characters; positional identities are about acts that constitute relations of
hierarchy, distance, or perhaps afliation.
Localized gured worlds have their own valued qualities, their own
Positional Identities
129
Ex
am
Co
py
130
Ex
am
Co
py
Positional Identities
131
Ex
am
Co
py
category are the (practical) part and (cultural) parcel of the reproduction
of social division, and of the categories that are its elements.
A controversy has raged in anthropological linguistics over womens
styles of speaking in the United States and whether they should be
viewed in the enduring, almost essentialist terms of subculture or in
the relational terms of situated practice. Tannen (1990) and others take
the former position, which we have called culturalist. Women grow up
learning a set of values and ways of being in the world, which they
translate into ways of speaking. McConnell-Ginet (1988, 1989; Eckert
and McConnell-Ginet 1992), among others, takes a more constructivist
position, arguing that women (and men) grow up learning how positions
of relative power are communicated. Since women are often forced into
positions of lesser power, they end up using deferential speech strategies
more often than men.
Our approach does not automatically give us the answer to the controversy, but it does suggest that the situation is too complex to be settled by
adopting either the culturalist or the constructivist position. It seems to
us a double mistake to think of these cross-cutting relational identities as
somehow cleanly separable from gured worlds. First, it is erroneous to
believe that gured worlds all partake of these differentia in like manner.
Rather, conventions of privileged access associated with gender, caste, or
some other major social division may or may not have been taken up,
elaborated, and made hegemonic in a particular gured world or eld of
power. In the schools of Naudada, the language of hierarchy communicated through the rules for exchanging food and water was being used to
subvert the system of caste privilege; in the tea stalls, the same language
was being used to maintain it.
A second mistake, the reverse of the rst, is to think that styles of
indicating relative social position can be cleanly separated from a gured
world of moral meaningsthat they are arbitrary indicators which
evoke no gured world of their own.5 In the world of academia, being
verbally aggressive may be a sign of high status and position; but for a
person who has formed an identity in a gured world where maintaining
egalitarian relations is important, verbal aggressiveness has connotations
of a moral failing.
Signithia Fordham (1993), drawing from a long-term study of Capital
High School in Washington, D.C., provides an example of both of these
points. She reveals the nuanced ways in which major social divisions
132
Ex
am
Co
py
Positional Identities
133
Ex
am
Co
py
order to conform to the model of a good student. How had the young
women at Capital High arrived at these positional identities? What interests us is the processes of development over the long term. The long
term, however, happens through day-to-day encounters and is built,
again and again, by means of artifacts, or indices of positioning, that
newcomers gradually learn to identify and then possibly to identify
themselves witheither positively or negatively, through either acceptance or rejection.
In the groups that we studied, as in any group engaged in jointly
creating and participating in a gured world, day-to-day practices always
positioned the participants situationally, relative to one another. That is,
participants in collaborative activitiesbe they staff members producing
a treatment plan in a mental health clinic, old hands welcoming a newcomer to an AA meeting, or a romantically involved couple going out to
see a lmengaged in conversation and interaction that invariably constructed their own social position and their social relations with one
another.
As social constructivists emphasize, these discourses and the other
forms of cultural artifacts used in everyday practices construct subjects
and subject positions. These positions are, at least provisionally, imposed
upon parties to the practice. The sociologist R. W. Connell provides an
example of this idea when he sums up the argument that gender is more
appropriately treated as a process or a practice than as a static attribute or
an enduring characteristic. He suggests that gender would be more
transparent if it were a verb rather than a noun: that its signicant
qualities would be clearer if we said, I gender you, you gender me, she
genders him; or, better yet, I try to gender you, you try to gender
me, and so on (Connell 1987: 140).
Entitled people speak, stand, dress, emote, hold the oorthey carry
out privileged activitiesin ways appropriate to both the situation of the
activity and their position within it. Those who speak, stand, dress, hold
the oor, emote, and carry out activities in these proper ways are seen
to be making claims to being entitled. Speaking certain dialects, giving
particular opinions, and holding the oor are indices of claims to privilege.
Examples of positional markers, and of the social work that goes on to
maintain their value, abound in ethnographies. In the gured world of
gender relations in a Mehinaku village in Brazil, described by Gregor
134
Ex
am
Co
py
(1977), the mens house was an important part of the apparatus of male
privilege. Men, especially when gathered together, protected the inviolability of that space. Women were threatened with gang rape should
they enter the house and see the sacred utes housed there. Men also
engaged in taunting women as a group during certain festivals.7 Heln
Page (1994) details the ways in which public issues in the United States
are dened in the public sphere from a white perspective, and how this
guarded space preserves the system of race privilege. Hill (1995) shows
how the speaking of junk Spanish by nonSpanish speakers in the
United States works to debase the speaking of Spanish, keeping it an
index of lower social position.
In Naudada, husbands usually addressed their wives with the less
respectful pronominal form used to address children and animals. The
respect and deference owed to superiors were communicated through
other pronouns. Thus each time he used this form of address a husband
afforded his wife a position inferior to his own. In reply, the usual,
respectful forms of address that wives employed for husbands would
accord him the greater deference. Their social relationshiphis superordination, her subordinationwas constantly reconstituted by the very
media of this discursive practice.
Another example of the affording of a position comes from a practice
in Naudada that depends upon the food etiquette of castes. The tea stall
owners of Naudada served members of the Damai and other untouchable castes, but required them to wash their own cups and glasses.
Because people of higher castes avoided food or utensils that had been
touched by people of castes considered to be so impure as to pollute, tea
stall owners, by enforcing this rule about washing, implicitly claimed to
be, or positioned themselves as, pure, superior, and keepers of purity for
others. They claimed the qualities of the higher castes, elaborated in
relation to the gured world of caste relations, at the same time inviting
customers of lower castes to enact a subject position of inferiority. For
similar reasons, and with similar implications for the parties relative
positions, husbands refused to eat leftover food from their wives plates,
but it was not expected that wives would refuse their husbands leftover food.
Viewed over the long term, these day-to-day practices are social work,
acts of inclusion/exclusion, of allowing/compelling only certain people
to evince the sign, that maintains positions and the value of artifacts as
Positional Identities
135
Ex
am
Co
py
indices of position. Bourdieu (1977a) shows that maintaining ones relative position in the Kabyles gured world of honor demanded such
social work on a day-to-day basis. The value of relational indices and the
relative right to use them are maintained through social work of the kind
performed by Tila Kumari and Shantas brothers. These valuations and
the restrictions that enforce them have to be imposed, and the outcome
of their imposition is uncertain. There is no guarantee that those upon
whom they are imposed will not try to refuse the implicit positioning, as
did Muna. There is no guarantee, in fact, that everyone will have been
brought sufciently into the language of the relational markers to
understand the would-be impositions and take them seriously.
Much of the inclusionary/exclusionary work of sign restriction is done
simply by the inclusion or exclusion of certain types of people from
sites where the signing knowledge is interacted as a matter of course
(see Rogoff 1990). Trosset (1986) describes the difculties of a foreigner
learning to speak Welsh in Wales. For various reasons, Welsh speakers
invariably switch to English in the presence of a nonWelsh speaker,
thus effectively limiting the signal means to their identity as Welsh, the
ability to speak the everyday tongue.
Gearing and colleagues (1979) describe how processes of inclusion/exclusion work in the absence of clear controlthat is, even when
dialects can be overheard, or more privileged ways of acting can be
directly observed and therefore imitated. They analyze the means by
which children in school are kept from learning skills that are taken as
indices of social position. They emphasize that knowledge (reading,
knowledge of chemistry, skills in repairing machinery) is proprietary;
that it is generally associated with, or belongs to, a recognized category
of people; and that, by virtue of this relation, the use of knowledge signals identity.8 Hence, even in situations where all students are admitted
to the arena of learning, learning is likely to become unevenly distributed in its specics. Teachers will take some students groping claims to
knowledge seriously on the basis of certain signs of identity. These students they will encourage and give informative feedback. Others, whom
they regard as unlikely or even improper students of a particular subject
(girls and shop skills, working-class students and philosophical essays),
are less likely to receive their serious response.9
Bourdieu (1984, 1977a) addresses the issue of timing: the point in
their development when children are given the opportunity to learn
136
Ex
am
Co
py
Positional Identities
137
Ex
am
Co
py
Within the constructivist emphasis on the importance of discursive positioningpositioning by the cultural artifacts of discoursethere is also
a counterpart open to those who, afforded positions, do not always take
them up. Della and Karla, two students discussed in Chapter 5, provide
contrasting examples of this kind of refusal.
Della rejected her professors attempt to recast her as other than a
student, his guring of her as a type from the world of romance and
attractiveness. But here we want to go beyond these ideas of positioning
and resistance. Della was inexperienced with this sort of incident. Although she did not accept the position afforded her, her rejection was
rather feeble. She showed her embarrassment and tried to forestall future
incidents simply by eluding the teachers notice.
Karla took stronger measures. For instance, during a period when she
was ill, she felt neglected by her boyfriend and thought he was making
excuses not to see her because he was afraid her illness was contagious.
Generally, she felt he had begun to take her for granted. Finally she
challenged him, claiming that he was treating her as though she were a
germ (Holland and Skinner 1987).11 In the incident described in Chapter 5, Karla was pursued by her former teacher, who saw her as a potential lover. Although he used various meansincluding trying to position
her (against her own attraction to the intellectual life) as ignorant of the
attitude of intellectuals toward adulterynone succeeded. Karla intensied her means of refusal with each new attempt, until she nally succeeded in warning off the teacher. Karla was one of the women in our
study who were more determined, more active in the world of romance,
more of an agent. She was adept at refusing positions that were afforded
her and instead creating positions she liked.12
It is important, in understanding positioning, to pay attention to the
fact that positional identities develop heuristically over time. The Vygotskian emphasis on semiotic mediation is helpful for understanding the
process by which children, or neophytes to gured worlds of any age,
develop the dispositions of relational identities. Semiotic mediation is
also a means by which these dispositions can be countered and sometimes overcome.13 People may develop a sense (in Bourdieus terms) of
their worlds, an expertise in the use of cultural artifacts, that may come
to re-mediate their positions in them.
The development of social position into a positional identityinto
138
Co
py
dispositions to voice opinions or to silence oneself, to enter into activities or to refrain and self-censor, depending on the social situation
comes over the long term, in the course of social interaction. Relational
identities are publicly performed through perceptible signs. People tell
each other who they claim to be in society in myriad ways. In Naudada,
Skinner found, children learned early that a womans marital status was
expressed by diverse signs: by the tilhari (a type of necklace) that married women wear, for example, or the vermilion powder worn in the
part of their hair. They learned that tea stall owners would not wash the
glasses of a lower-caste person, nor would high-caste persons allow
lower-caste persons to enter their homes. But much of this learning may
happen in a nonreective way.
Ex
am
Positional Identities
139
py
freshest looking vegetables, and mentally planned the meal for the
evening. As I glanced into the shiny metal surface of the butchers
display case, I noticed someone who looked terribly familiar: a typical
young housewife, clad in slip-on sandals and the loose, cotton shift
called home wear, a woman walking with a characteristically Japanese bend to the knees and a sliding of the feet. Suddenly, I clutched the
handle of the stroller to steady myself as a wave of dizziness washed
over me, for I realized I had caught a glimpse of nothing less than my
own reection. (1617)
Ex
am
Co
Kondo had acquired the dress, posture, and habits of a young Japanese
housewife (or so she identied them) simply by immersing herself in
social activity from the position that her gender and her associates assigned her. Her acquisition of the dispositions that marked a particular,
gendered identity had occurred without her awareness, and the moment
of recognition was disorienting. The image of herself in the butchers
display case and the image of herself in her minds eye did not match, and
that disparity led Kondo to distance herself from her eldwork. Immersion gave way to a reticence in which she gauged her activity according
to the recalled standards of her self-image.
No doubt many aspects of positional identities develop out of ones
awareness, as Kondos had before she caught a glimpse of herself. No
doubt many behaviors develop out of awareness, unmediated by ones
reection upon them as claims to social position. One simply participates in the typical arrangements of people in houses, say, where one is
more likely to nd, in the United States, women in the kitchen and
men in the workshop or yard; or in Naudada, women at the hearth, men
at the tea shop. Or one simply takes part in everyday activities and nds
young Japanese(-American) women walking about with sliding steps
and slightly bent knees, pushing babies in strollers as they shop in the
afternoon.
Occasionally a child may be admonished in a way that includes mention of social position. A mother may tell her daughter that girls dont
do x. Shanta was certainly warned away from the plow in a dramatic
and upsetting way, but perhaps the usual path to relational identity is
through simple associations that pass unnoticed in any conscious way.14
It may not be until later that the associations between social positions
and entitlements become a matter of reection. The child at rst, and
perhaps for a very long time, may not associate the access that she gains
140
Ex
am
Co
py
or does not gain to spaces and activities with the language of social
claims. She may not consciously realize that her developing dispositions
are caste-specic. Especially at rst, she undoubtedly does not say to
herself, Tila Kumari is a Bahun. To go into her yard is to claim to be of
higher caste than I am. If I go there, she is likely to mistreat me.
Other indices of positional identities, however, become conscious and
available as tools that can be used to affect self and other. Muna interpreted Tila Kumari as accusing her and her friends of being morally bad.
She defended herself, to herself and to Debra, as not deserving such an
evaluation. In the lived world of Naudadan domestic and community
relations, a womans social worth was gured according to the life path of
the good woman (described in Chapter 3). Girls of Munas age had long
been used to hearing and using terms such as radi (widow) to insult
others. These were derogatory terms for women who had strayed from
the life path of the good Hindu woman. They had even come to understand why radi was a negative terma widow was a woman who had
fallen from the life path by outliving her husband. Further, the girls
cared about their own moral standing in the community and often constructed for Skinner representations of themselves as good daughters and
sisters (see Chapter 10). Munas emotional response to Tila Kumaris
scoldings indicated her attachment to the understanding of herself as a
good person.
In other words, some positional identities and their associated markers are clearly gured. In Naudada, good works and good behavior, when
contrasted to the misbehavior that constitutes pap (sin), are noted and
related to the script of the life path of a good person. In the world of
romance of college students in the American South, attractiveness as a
form of symbolic capital, a measure of ones social worth, was gured
extensively, not only as a key element in the development of romantic
relationships, but also as a motive for numerous projects, practices, and
artifacts of beautication. Perhaps these gured aspects of relational
identities become relatively conscious for anyone successfully recruited
into the gured world where such qualities are deemed important. The
everyday aspects of lived identities, in contrast, may be relatively unremarked, ungured, out of awareness, and so unavailable as a tool for
affecting ones own behavior.
We do not mean to imply that identities subsist in two exclusive
forms, one type a pure product of imagination and the other of un-
Positional Identities
141
Ex
am
Co
py
142
Ex
am
Co
py
Positional Identities
143
Ex
am
Co
py
the game, as Bourdieu calls it, for how such claims on their part will be
received.16 They come to have relational identities in their most rudimentary form: a set of dispositions toward themselves in relation to
where they can enter, what they can say, what emotions they can have,
and what they can do in a given situation.
Explorations of the processes of these formations, followed in more
depth in the next chapters, suggest that the associations children and
neophytes form with different spaces and activities in their environment
are, in fact, social positions that have become dispositions. Gendered
dispositions to participate, or not, in given activities, develop in places
where gender participation in activities is treated as a claim of gender
specicity. Dispositions of lower-caste Naudadan individuals and groups
to speak, or not to speak, with an authoritative voice in public gatherings
where members of higher castes are present develop in places where
speaking is treated as a claim to caste position.
Yet positional identities are not without their disruptions. The same
semiotic mediators, adopted by people to guide their behavior, that may
serve to reproduce structures of privilege and the identities, dominant
and subordinate, dened within them, may also work as a potential for
liberation from the social environment. We will see in the next chapters
how people sometimes x upon objectications of themselves that they
nd unacceptable. These objectications become the organizing basis of
resentment and often of more active resistance. When individuals learn
about gured worlds and come, in some sense, to identify themselves in
those worlds, their participation may include reactions to the treatment
they have received as occupants of the positions gured by the worlds.17
Yet the metapragmatic capability to gure social practicethrough
narrative, drawing, singing, and other means of articulationis at the
same time a capability to gure it otherwise than it is. Its rehearsal is
the opportunity to re-create dispositions to activities-in-mind that give
shape to this dissatisfaction. The interchange or convertibility of the two
contexts of identity provides opportunities to reform either by recourse
to the other. In other words, symbols also enable the objectication of
the treatment that women or lower-caste people receive, so that narrativized worlds are created around stories of these treatments and visions
of better treatment.
Co
py
am
In our study of college women in the southern United States (see Chapter 5), the womens identication within the world of romance entailed
that they form a sense of the social value of both self and others in
that world.1 Identication with that world meant taking, to varying degrees, what Bourdieu (1977a, 1977b; Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977)
called symbolic violence into ones self and perpetrating (and perpetuating) it against others. Settling social positionthe subtext of interaction and the stuff of positional identitiesis a matter of struggle, often
muted or even unrecognized, whose effects live on in personal and social
history.
To illustrate the point, let us begin with Karens description of things
that had happened since her last interview:
Ex
The interviewer asked why the man, Sam, had acted the way he did. I
dont know . . . maybe she just had it in her head that he liked her . . . and
144
Copyright 1998 The President and Fellows of Harvard College
145
py
he was just trying to talk to this other girl or something. But he did act,
he acted sort of too good for her, you know?
Annette was upset. Karen explained that Annette was trying to reason
out Sams actions:
Co
Ex
am
Karens embarrassment in telling this story was palpable. Her discomfort draws our attention to the importance of attractiveness. Karen was
clearly embarrassed to say explicitly that her friend was not pretty
enough for Sams tastes. It was as though Annette had something to be
ashamed of, and Karens speech marked that shame. And, even though
Annette was obviously thinking over Sams behavior, Karen did not try to
save her time and worry by explaining. This incident underscored, for
us, the pivotal aspect of attractiveness: Why should not being really
pretty be something to be embarrassed about?
No doubt there was another source of Karens embarrassment. Annette
had publicly and boldly proclaimed her attraction to Sam, and, by approaching him, had in effect laid claim to a comparable attractiveness of
her own, only to have it demolished by his lack of interest. In the student
culture attractiveness was very important. It was at the heart of the
gender status quo. Annettes claim to social worth among her peers had
been proven false (for further analysis see Holland and Skinner 1987;
Holland and Eisenhart 1990).
In Chapter 5 we noted that some women were more adept than others
at claimingand refusingroles in romantic activities and that, as a
146
Ex
am
Co
py
matter of that same skill, some were more adept at claiming a high
level of attractiveness. We want to pursue that clue and direct our attention to how these relational aspects of identity in the world of romance
are negotiated actively within social interaction. Only by following this
course can we understand Annettes vulnerability to the kind of insult
she suffered and, the broader point, womens vulnerability to the symbolic violence that marks the ways romance is lived.
How were women developing their sense of place as gendered actors
in the world of romance, and as more attractive or less attractive individuals? An important means is participation in the discursive practices
described in the chapters on gured worlds and positionality. We noted
in Chapter 6 the idea that gender is more appropriately treated as a
process or a practice than as a static attribute or an enduring characteristic; that, in Connells words, gender would be more transparent if
it were a verb rather than a noun (1987: 84). We would argue analogously about the more specic, gendered quality of attractiveness. It
would be more accurate to use a verb that meant to make attractive: I
make you attractive, you make me attractive, she makes him attractive, and so on. This phrasing de-essentializes the quality by revealing its social-relational dynamicsthe continually negotiated constructions and reconstructions that create real attractiveness and attractive
people.
Because of its attention to everyday encounters and to the maneuvers
and dilemmas of participants actively engaged in those encounters, the
focus on practice, and on the constitution of images and statuses through
interaction, is reminiscent of symbolic interactionism. Unlike most traditional forms of symbolic interactionism, however, practice theories go
well beyond the encounters at hand. Bourdieu (1977a, 1990b), addressing practice in general, and Connell (1987), addressing practice in relation to gender, both build on symbolic interactionism, adding a critical
step. They theorize about how systems of power and privilege render the
participants of encounters more or less equal, more or less like agents,
and more or less interpersonally powerful. Here too we must situate
these interactions in a larger system, by recalling the cultural sources
that give these discourses and practices their potency. One important
source has already been introduced: the gured world of romance. Along
with it, other gured and positional aspects of identities in the United
States and the Southrace, class, sexual orientationevoke and give
147
Ex
am
Co
py
148
Co
py
such an incident. Analysis of the videotapes transcript allows us to explicate aspects of the positionality of romantic identities in general and
to explore what happens when these identities are evoked in the workplace. The video captures visually the importance of gestures and spatial
positioning. It is useful in particular for understanding how the gendered identities of the world of romance are evoked clandestinely in the
workplacehow the playing eld becomes complicated by two gured
worlds. In much of the incident, what is spoken stays in the realm of
work. The world of sex and romance and the positioning of the participants in that world are evoked largely through nonverbal gestures and
physical contacts.
The video clip we quote was part of a televised program on sexual
harassment in the workplace. The simulated incident was arranged by a
social psychologist, John Pryor, to illustrate his research on the conditions under which men are more likely to sexually harass women at work
(Pryor et al. 1993). Our focus is not on the behavior of the men in the
incident but rather on what this behavior can tell us about the readings
of like incidents by the participants in our studies.
Ex
am
149
Ex
am
Co
py
150
am
Co
py
Ex
151
Ex
am
Co
py
experimenter, John, said to the subject, Mr. Williams, Now I dont know
if you noticed the girl out in the hall, but the girls that are being sent
down here by the Department of Ofce Management are real foxy.
Here John drew upon a lexicon, comprising hundreds of gendermarked terms, that men in our studies had for talking about women as
gures of romance.4 This male lexicon provided many terms that ascribed value to different types of women and described the ways they
were likely to behave in romantic relationships. The term foxy positioned the womanrelative to other culturally typed women, such as
broads, babes, or cowsas one who was sexy, a companion with
whom a man would want to be seen, and likable in that she was not
likely to be overly demanding (Holland and Skinner 1987).
In our studies of the lexicons that men used to refer to women and
women to men, it became abundantly clear that these vocabularies were
not just tools of representation. The words were used to do social work
as well. What stood out for many of the men and women we studied
was less the semantics of these gender-marked lexicons than the ways
in which the terms could be used. Their rst remarks were often about
the potential use of the words as insults. For example, some respondents grouped terms such as bitch, shrew, dog, dumb blonde,
and airhead together because they could all be used to insult a woman.
(Other terms, such as sweetheart, were said to be endearments.)
Against the conceptual horizon provided by the gured world of romance, terms such as dog, bitch, and the milder womens libber
could be used to position, negatively, one woman relative to others.
Bitches were women who in the mans view overvalued their own
attractiveness and so demanded too much. A spurned lover would demean the woman who rejected him by telling friends that she had turned
out to be a bitch. Likewise, women had an arsenal of termssuch as
prick, nerd, and assholethat they used to claim that particular
men were of little value.
The social work of the terms was even more complex. Ones partners,
or those to whom one was attracted, reected back upon ones own
attractiveness. In the taken-for-granted scenario, those who were equally
attractive were attracted to one another.5 Hunks were not attracted to
nags or dogs but to foxy girls or dolls, and likewise foxy girls
were not attracted to jerks, nerds, wimps, or turkeys. Still, the
attributionexactly who was a hunk and who was a creepvaried
152
Ex
am
Co
py
153
A Gendering Insult
Co
py
Ex
am
In the two mens interactions with the woman, they used gestures that
invoked the world of romance and sex. John said to Cindy, Dont I know
you from somewhere? You look like an old girlfriend of mine. He put
his hands on her in an intimate manner, an intimacy that was unexplained by any prior history. His gestures and phrases, and the later
physical intimacy of Mr. Williams, all invoked a clandestine discourse, a
discourse that opened a space within the workplace that was ambiguously, if at all, governed by the work at hand, or the gured relations of
occupational specialization and merit. The space was instead infused
with gender relations, interpreted according to the model of romance,
and peopled by types who were relevant to that world.
Yet the work went on, the computer trainer continued the training.
The sexual world was always close to the surface, threatening to overwhelm the ostensible activity, but the discourse remained submerged,
clandestine. Hence, here and in the incidents described to us, it was
difcult for the women to refuse such a gendering. Especially in cases
where gestures and innuendo were the language of choice, the evocation
of the world of sex and romance could be counter-charged to the woman.
Should she too blatantly or explicitly avoid the unwanted intimacies and
communicate her refusal too forcefully, she could be accused of reading
meaning into gestures inappropriately, of seeing something that no one
else sees, or of fantasizing that she is attractive enough to be the object of
a mans desire. She could be accused of purposefully evoking the world of
romance herself. Her clothes, her makeup, her posture, and her movements could be scrutinized as cues, and put forward as evidence of her
154
Ex
am
Co
py
desire. Why was Cindy wearing a sweater that left the tops of her shoulders bare?7
When constantly invoked, despite a womans wishes, the discourse of
romance constituted a refusal to treat her as worker or student, on a par
with other workers or students. It was a refusal to accord the woman any
value other than that of her attractiveness. This is a general strategy of
male resistance to the incorporation of women into traditionally male
worksites (Weston 1990). The situation simulated in the video clip is
more complex. The work went on; the computer trainer continued the
training; but he did so in such a way that the world of romance and
sexuality inltrated the activity at hand, giving all acts a double signicance. The incidents women described to us were similar. Sometimes
they were even more blatant, and sometimes more ambiguous. We did
not hear of situations in which male teachers or employers absolutely
refused to treat a woman as a student or employee. Instead we heard of
situations in which women were suddenly, without warning, removed
from the context of work, treated as objects of desire, and positioned in
the world of romance.
The women in our studies, most of whom were between eighteen and
twenty-two, were shocked when such incidents happened to them or
their friends. This was especially true of women who had been accustomed to deciding which men were and which were not in the group of
potential romantic/sexual interests. Some of these bosses or teachers
were considered too old to be appropriate partners, and their romantic
approach was doubly troubling to the women. Especially distressing
were those incidents that were observed by fellow students or employees. The women invariably described themselves as intensely embarrassed. They felt belittled and unable to counter-attack. (In none of the
cases did the teller report that the audience came to her defense.)
Some of the women were learning through experience that their vulnerability to what we call the sexual auction block extended into the
workplace and the classroom. They could be reconstituted, without their
invitation or permission and before their fellows, from student or worker
to object of desire and token of attractiveness. Some of the women experienced these incidents as revelations. One incident sufced to make
them realize that the clandestine discourse of romance and sexuality lay
just under the surface in every classroom and workplace: that they might
at any time be treated as a romantic or sexual object regardless of their
155
py
Co
But, you know, this has caused me to do a lot of thinking about the
nature of the human male. Here is a man you would never suspect . . .
upstanding member of the community, seemingly happily married.
What more could he want? And trying to seduce an eighteen-year-old
girl . . . and an intellectual seduction, too. Its made me a little leery of
older male teachers who act incredibly friendly, because there have
been a lot of them, that I always looked upon as just really nice people
who were interested in their students. But now this whole other dimension has been added of, Hey, wait a minute; maybe hes not interested
in my intellectual development.
am
An Insulting Gendering
Ex
The woman in the video clip was exposed to a gendering insult: without any invitation on her part and in a work situation where it was
supposedly irrelevant, she was evaluated and treated according to her
attractiveness. But there was more to the incident: not only was the
gendering itself an insult; its substance or content was insulting as well.
The discourse of romance evoked in the incident was double-edged. It
constructed desire, but it also positioned the parties to the romantic
encounter, ranking them according to their relative amounts of the symbolic capital, attractiveness.
Similarly, on the two college campuses we studied, the gured world
of romance provided a means for creating gendered persons of more or
less value, possessing more or less symbolic capital. Students used the
lexicon of gender-marked terms to position themselves and others. Partners treatment of each other was also read as claims about their relative
amounts of symbolic capital.
Romantic and sexual activity were understood by the students to be
156
Ex
am
Co
py
about attraction. They were organized around the taken-for-granted unfolding of a romantic/sexual relationship that we presented in Chapter 5:
Two equally attractive people were drawn to each other. The man treated
the woman well: he appreciated her; he recognized her special qualities;
he did nice things for her; and he was sensitive to her desires. The
woman, in turn, showed her affection for him and allowed the relationship to become more intimate. Both were rewarded by the intimacy of
the relationship and by the validation of their attractiveness.
In this gured world, attraction was the force that produced intimate
cross-gender relationships, and the ability to attract was a crucial quality
of those who would participate in the world of romance. Attractiveness
determined how a woman would be treated by men. Attractive women
received attention, gifts, and intimacy and gained access to whatever
social and material amenities the men wished to share. Unattractive
women either received ill treatment from attractive men or settled for
relations with unattractive, less prestigious men. And it worked similarly
in reverse: attractive men were admired and chosen as intimate partners
by attractive women; unattractive men had to settle for less attractive
women.
At rst attractiveness seemed to be construed as an intrinsic characteristic of a person, a set of qualities that some had naturally, others
cultivated, and many lacked. Closer examination, however, showed attractiveness to be less an enduring or essential quality than a product of
ones relations and activities. It was drawn from the attractiveness of
those who were attracted to one and how one fared in romantic/sexual
encounters.8 A mans attractiveness was afrmed, increased, or diminished by each of his encounters with women, according to the outcome.
The same was true for a woman. Attractiveness was a form of symbolic
capital: a putatively unchanging attribute of the person that actually
uctuated according to the treatment he or she received from others.9
There were ways to make up for mismatches in attractiveness. A relatively unattractive man could succeed with a relatively attractive woman
if he treated her especially well. He could be exceptionally sensitive to
her, especially creative and clever in pleasing her. In this way, expectations of good treatment became a language of claims to relative attractiveness. A woman who seemed to expect special treatment, with little
demonstration of affection on her part, was interpreted as claiming to be
more attractive than her partner. If a man felt a woman was demanding
157
Ex
am
Co
py
158
Ex
am
Co
py
within the workplace, and its double-edged nature. The discourse can
construct desire and pleasure, but it can also construct degradation.
Women in our study described many incidents in which they felt
demeaned by mens treatment. The incidents had the themes just elucidated: their (potential) boyfriends and lovers enacted positions of greater
entitlement and thus cast the women as relatively unattractive. The
women complained of being treated as though they were only one of a
crowd of women, many of whom would do just as well. They also objected to mens expectations that they would rush into intimate relations
with little prelude. They disliked being made to feel as though they were
simply props that men used to demonstrate their status to their buddies.
The incidents in the classroom or the workplace were similarly insulting and even harder to manage. At parties and social events, in dating
relationships, a woman had ways to counter a mans view of his superior attractiveness. She could oppose him by trying to insult his attractiveness. She could publicly label him a prick or a jerk or a nerd.
Or she could simply leave, without much fear of damaging retaliation on
his part.
Return for a moment to Karens account of Sam, the big man on
campus, and his treatment of Annette, the ordinary girl. Karen described
her own reaction to Sam: I didnt think he was attractive anymore. Her
inclination was to demean him, to label him an unprestigious man, an
unattractive type: I wanted to tell him . . . he was acting like an ass.
The women had more trouble responding to such insults from bosses
or instructors; they were not so ready to insult the symbolic capital of
men in positions of authority. Potential retaliation from a boss or an
instructor could be much more damaging. Compared with men of their
peer groups, bosses and instructors had more power to impose their
vision of the divisions of the social world and their position within it
(Bourdieu 1985b: 732).10 It was difcult, indeed dangerous, to resist
because the boss or employer had an independent source of attractiveness/prestige as a result of his position. It was also difcult because of the
double-talk nature of the clandestine discourse. Shannon Hoffman, who
participated in Pryors experiments, commented in the video that, even
though the situation was articial and sure to end quickly, she experienced a sense of powerlessness. She was being treated as a low-status
object, a person of few entitlements, and placed in a position where she
could be ridiculed if she protested.
159
py
Co
In 1985, I was [the general] manager at a new car automobile dealership . . . One day I entered the parts department for a consultation with
the [parts] manager. As the door closed behind me I turned and without warning came face to face with a very large pinup calendar sponsored by a tool company and displaying a bikini-clad, buxom woman
whose exaggerated body positioning and seductive gaze infused the
image with clear, culturally coded sexuality.
Ex
am
In this brief description this incident seems quite different from the
one simulated in the video. The parts manager did not put his hands on
Eva. He said nothing about his old girlfriends. He said nothing about
bikinis, nor did he call attention to the bikini-clad woman on his door.
There was no indication that he had put up the calendar in anticipation
that Eva would see it. But Haleys reaction suggests a similarity: I felt my
face ush with anger and shame as the ground holding me on an equal
level with my fellow manager shifted beneath my feet.
The same popular ideology of romance, the perceptible evocation of a
gured world, made Eva Haleys situation as potent and insulting as the
situation faced by the woman in the video. The pinup on the calendar
recalled the world of romance and attractiveness. The space that was
ostensibly a workplace was infused with gender relations. In that space,
Haleys superior position as a manager of the car dealership, relative to
her colleague, the parts manager, was rendered less potent. Instead, their
positions in the world of romance and sexuality, that is, of a woman in
relation to a man, were brought to the fore. To the extent that she had to
occupy that position, the basis for her claim to superior status as a
worker was vitiated. She experienced a gendering insult.
Furthermore, just as in the video, the gendering was an insulting one.
The means of insult were different; the outcomes were similar. In the
video simulation Cindy suffered an insulting gendering when the men
treated her as being less attractive than they were. In order to understand
160
Ex
am
Co
py
Privileging Spaces
Evas response to the pinup calendar shows that her position as a woman
in the gured world of romance has become disposition. She was very
much affected by threats to her social worth, to her symbolic capital of
attractiveness. Her dispositionto see herself through the gured world
and to recognize her vulnerability to insults to her attractiveness, even in
a situation that was supposedly divorced from romancewas also the
161
Ex
am
Co
py
disposition whose development the women in our study described. Recall such situations as the one where Dellas looks were singled out for
sexual innuendo by her professor (Chapter 5) and the encounter between Sam and Annette that Karen recounted.
Men, too, were vulnerable to having their attractiveness insulted by
women, to having their social worth belittled, to bearing the brunt of
symbolic violence. Women could accept their gifts, their attention, and
their good treatment and still not reciprocate with any show of affection. They could refuse to allow the relationship to become more emotionally or physically intimate. Women could insult them verbally as
well, referring to them as pricks, nerds, creeps, and other unappealing names. Nonetheless, our studies showed that womens treatment
by men had a greater impact upon evaluations of their social worth than
the relationship reversed. That is, the gender ideology discussed here
had more importance for women than for men.
On the face of it, the romantic/sexual relationship that constitutes the
standard of meaning in the modelthe pairing of attractive people who
give and get equally, and the expected outcome of intimacy and prestige
for bothseems to favor neither the woman nor the man. But, in the
student world of the late 1970s and early 1980s, equality was not the
rule. Womens attractiveness and prestige were far more dependent upon
their relationships with men than vice versa. Men had diverse sources of
symbolic capital. Men on the basketball team and men of (potential)
wealth, for example, had sources of attractiveness and prestige that were
largely independent of how women treated them.
There was no such alternative source for women. Participation on
womens sports teamsno matter how many championships the teams
wonadded little to the athletes attractiveness to male students; the
same was true for womens participation in student government or university performance groups. The playing eld for romantic encounters
was not equal. When Sam snubbed her, Annette had little else to fall back
on for validation of her social worth. Had she similarly snubbed him,
Sam, a well-known athlete, would not have been as bereft.
It is clearly fairly easy to create spaces, gured by the world of romance, in which men are especially privileged. This easy access to privilege is a consequence of mens more numerous sources of symbolic capital. Yet other social and material contexts may affect the ways popular
ideologies of romance are played out in particular sites. One woman in
162
Ex
am
Co
py
our study pointed out that women outnumbered men at her university.
Consequently, in her view, all the men enjoyed an inated sense of their
attractiveness and prestige. Men who, in a larger market, would have
been considered undesirable were treated as though they were attractive.
Hence, for that time and on that campus at least, they were attractive.
Pryors ndings, reported in the video, could be interpreted along the
same lines. The experimental conditions set up a situation in which
simply being male gave all the men who participated symbolic capital
and its attendant entitlements relative to the women. In the words of the
videos narration, the experimental conditions established a permissive
situation. The men felt free to be intimate with the woman.
We would augment this analysis by drawing upon the ideology of
romance and attractiveness. The experimental conditions established a
privileging space with two characteristics. First, male/female relations
were interpreted according to the gured world of romance and attractiveness. Through his comments and actions the person in authority, the
experimenter, evoked this world. Second, the conditions created a space
that automatically afforded the men greater symbolic capital than the
women. The comments and actions of the experimenter, from his position of authority, not only evoked the world of romance but also positioned him and his male confederate as attractive/prestigious relative to
the woman. That authoritative position gave the men reason to expect
that the woman would treat them as attractive.
The most unsettling aspect of Pryors ndings, especially to those of us
who are women living in this society, is how little effort it took to create
a privileging space in which a high percentage of the men involved felt
entitled to treat the woman as though her social worth were considerably
less than theirs.12 It sadly corroborates other evidence, such as the all
too frequent occasions when male athletes, misusing the attractiveness
and prestige attributed to them, act out their entitlement by mistreating
women. The fraternity rape described by Sanday (1990) is an even more
extreme case. Pryors ndings are also particularly distressing because
the situation was putatively a workplace, where attractiveness should be
irrelevant. His data conrm that many women in the United States are
widely subject to evaluation, and potential degradation, in terms of the
popular ideology of romance and attractiveness, no matter the context of
activity.
That a high percentage of the men in the experiment engage in harass-
163
am
Co
py
ment does not lead us to think of the men, or men in general, as intrinsically or essentially sexual harassers. It does lead us to think of the way
the popular ideology of romance and attractiveness empowers men in
certain situations. It suggests that the ideology of romance was a potent
part of these mens experience; the world of heterosexual romance and
sexuality was very salient to them and very easily evoked. Pryors experiment spells out how easily men may be induced to adopt the positional
identity of an attractive man relating to a less attractive, less prestigious
woman. The experimental conditions created a particular sort of gendering space, a particular privileging space, that was very potent not only for
the woman but also for the men.
Many of the women in our studies had trouble handling such situations. Della, when her professor praised her attractiveness, felt embarrassed and subsequently tried to avoid him. Retreat was the only solution
she could conceive that would not risk provoking his further comment.
After Sam treated her badly, Annette was probably less quick to reveal her
attraction to a man and perhaps less likely to pursue one of Sams prestige. That the women struggled to manage such situations tells us not
that they were intrinsically victims but rather that the playing eld of the
encounters was unequal. The women had relatively few resources for
contesting such genderings.
Ex
Since the time of our studies of romance on college campuses, there have
been organized efforts by individuals and groups to use legal and quasilegal means to stop unwanted sexual advances. Now there are discourses
of sexual harassment and other sources of remedy beyond the individual womans attempts to counter-insult or dissuade a man from involving
her in unwanted relations. The language of these policies and laws, and
the debates over what precisely constitutes sexual harassment, have informed the relatively new discourse. They have at least created some new
categoriesbeyond prick, jerk, and the likefor interpreting and
naming the parties to the type of gendering insults analyzed in this
chapter.13 Were we to return to the same campuses today and interview
students about the incident simulated in the video, we would no doubt
nd reference to this discourse. Perhaps women would tell us about
incidents in which they did not respond with embarrassment, unex-
164
Ex
am
Co
py
pressed anger, or guilt, but instead rebuked the man for sexually harassing them. Perhaps we would hear, in other words, about cases where the
discourse of harassment was brought into the incidents themselves.
The availability of this discourse certainly does not eviscerate the
popular ideology of romance and attractiveness. Nor does it save women
from the type of gendering insults discussed here. The Anita
Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings were one potent testimony to womens
continuing vulnerability, even in the process of pressing claims of sexual
harassment, to degradation through discourses of desire (see Eisenhart
and Lawrence 1994). Nonetheless, there is little doubt that legal and
quasi-legal remedies for sexual harassment have altered the resources
available for contesting this form of sexism.14 The ideology of romance
and attractiveness has the force of a cultural inertia, born especially from
its potential for constructing pleasure and desire, but it cannot be assumed that inertia grants it an automatic monopoly on meaning. Instead
its place must be held or dislodged through social effort and struggle.
Women now have an alternative discourse, and sometimes the backing
of an enforcement apparatus, through which they may try to refuse or
defuse situations of the type we have described.
The discourse of sexual harassment affords a woman a new resource to
turn the playing eld to her advantage, redening the incident from one
of her inappropriate and degrading gendering into one of his negative
gendering, of outlawing and ostracizing the man. A woman in a situation
like Cindys could now try to alter the computer trainers actions by
threatening to denounce him as a sexual harasser. The emerging discourse of sexual harassment gives women a resource for disrupting the
construction of spaces that give the privileged positions to men. They
can try to convert these spaces into ones where men are reminded of
their liability to sanctions by university hearing boards, corporate committees, and government agencies. Had Eva Haleys encounter with the
bikini-clad pinup happened in the late 1990s, not in 1985, she might
have been moved to counter-attack. Instead of feeling devalued because
she failed to meet certain standards of physical appearance, she might
have tried to turn the parts managers ofce into a place that discomforted him, because the space he had created did not meet standards of
acceptability.15 She might have hung an antisexual harassment poster
over his pinup calendar.
How useful these resources will turn out to behow effectively they
165
Ex
am
Co
py
166
py
Ex
am
Co
IV
Ex
am
Co
py
py
Co
am
Ex
Copyright 1998 The President and Fellows of Harvard College
Co
py
Authoring Selves
am
Bakhtins vision of self-fashioning, which we call the space of authoring, resonates with what the case studies have told us about identity
formation. The cases belie any simplistic notion that identities are internalized in a sort of faxing process that unproblematically reproduces the
collective upon the individual, the social upon the body.1 Bakhtins concepts allow us to put words to an alternative vision, organized around
the conictual, continuing dialogic of an inner speech where active identities are ever forming.
Dialogism
Ex
170
py
Co
am
Languagelike the living concrete environment in which the consciousness of the verbal artist livesis never unitary. It is unitary only
as an abstract grammatical system of normative forms, taken in isolation from the concrete, ideological conceptualizations that ll it, and in
isolation from the uninterrupted process of historical becoming that is
a characteristic of all living language. Actual social life and historical
becoming create within an abstractly unitary national language a multitude of concrete worlds, a multitude of bounded verbal-ideological and
social belief systems; within these various systems (identical in the
abstract) are elements of language lled with various semantic and
axiological content and each with its own different sound. (1981: 288)
Ex
Authoring Selves
171
py
Co
am
Dialogic Selves
In the gured world of dialogism the vantage point rests within the I
and authoring comes from the I, but the words come from collective
experience. Words come already articulated by others:
Ex
172
py
elses. It becomes ones own only when the speaker populates it with
his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word,
adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this
moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and
impersonal language (it is not after all out of a dictionary that the
speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other peoples mouths,
in other peoples contexts, serving other peoples intentions: it is from
there that one must take the word, and make it ones own. (Bakhtin
1981: 293294)
Co
am
an active understanding . . . establishes a series of complex interrelationships, consonances and dissonances with the word and enriches
it with new elements. It is precisely such an understanding that the
speaker counts on. Therefore his orientation toward the listener is an
orientation toward a specic conceptual horizon, toward the specic
world of the listener; it introduces totally new elements into his discourse; it is in this way, after all, that various different points of view,
conceptual horizons, systems for providing expressive accents, various social languages come to interact with one another. The speaker
strives to get a reading on his own word, and on his own conceptual
system that determines this word, within the alien conceptual system of
the understanding receiver; he enters into dialogical relationships with
certain aspects of this system. The speaker breaks through the alien
conceptual horizon of the listener, constructs his own utterance on
alien territory, against his, the listeners, apperceptive background.
(Bakhtin 1981: 282)
Ex
It is not only being addressed, receiving others words, but the act of
responding, which is already necessarily addressed, that informs our
world through others. Identity, as the expressible relationship to others,
is dialogical at both moments of expression, listening and speaking.
Reminiscent of Mead (1934), Bakhtin insists that we also represent
ourselves to ourselves from the vantage point (the words) of others, and
that those representations are signicant to our experience of ourselves.
In Holquists rendition of Bakhtins views:
It will be remembered that the time of the self is always open, unnished, as opposed to the time we assume for others, which is (relative
to our own) closed, nalizable. And yet, in order to be known, to be
Authoring Selves
173
py
Ex
am
Co
The meaning that we make of ourselves is, in Bakhtins terms, authoring the self, and the site at which this authoring occurs is a space
dened by the interrelationship of differentiated vocal perspectives on
the social world. In Bakhtins vision, the self is to existence as the pronoun I is to language. Both the self and I designate pivotal positions
in the stream of (language) activity that goes on always.4 In explaining
what an I is, position, rather than content, is important. Suppose one
tries to dene I by summarizing the characteristics of everybody one
has heard use the term in the past week. One can imagine a prototypical
tree, but can one imagine a prototypical I? In Bakhtins system the self is
somewhat analogous to I. The self is a position from which meaning is
made, a position that is addressed by and answers others and the
world (the physical and cultural environment). In answering (which is
the stuff of existence), the self authors the worldincluding itself and
others.
The authoring self is invisible to itself. The phenomenology of the self
is, in Bakhtins terms, characterized by openendedness. Because the
self is the nexus of a continuing ow of activity and is participating in
this activity, it cannot be nalized. It cannot step outside of activity as
itself; the self as it reects upon its activity is different from the self
that acts. In Bakhtins view, the self-process must be dialogic. It consists,
as told by Holquist (1990: 22, 28), in relating, orchestrating, the I-for-itself (the center) and the not-I-in-me (the noncenter). The other is
authored, captured, and nalized in language as though the other were
not a subject just as open-ended as the self. And, by the same token, in
answering the other as its necessary counterpart, the self represents
(and thereby nalizes) itself through a collective language. Reiterating
Holquist: And yet, in order to be known, to be perceived as a gure that
can be seen, a person or thing must be put into the categories of the
other, categories that reduce, nish, consummate. The self authors itself, and is thus made knowable, in the words of others.
If, to be perceptible by others, we cast ourselves in terms of the other,
then we do that by seeing ourselves from the outside. That is, we assume
174
py
Ex
am
Co
Authoring Selves
175
Ex
am
Co
py
became the premiere building block of thought and feeling. Vygotsky put
forward a law: every function in the childs cultural development
appears twice: rst, on the social level, and later, on the individual level;
rst, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological) (Vygotsky 1978: 57).
This maxim entails that inner speech is preceded in ontogeny by external speech, where children talk as though speaking were simply part
of an activity, repeating words and gestures they have heard from others
(see Chapter 3). Vygotsky thus reversed the Piagetian formulation (that
speech begins for oneself), and argued that speech begins for others
and then eventually is directed toward oneself. Speech directed toward
oneself begins out loud (as so-called egocentric speech), but eventually becomes silent, inner speech, a speech whose formal characteristics
(such as ellipsis, deletion of the subject, focus on sense rather than
meaning) become differentiated from those of social speech (Vygotsky
1986; Voloshinov 1986). The possibility of directing speech to oneself is
equally, for Vygotsky, the possibility of achieving at least a modicum of
control over ones own behavior. One can at least have a voice in directing ones own actions.
As we discussed in Chapter 3, Vygotsky emphasized the ability of
humans to use mediating devices, especially symbols, to modify their
own mental environment and so direct their own behavior. These devices were generally rst taken up in interaction with others, and then
only gradually taken into ones self-activity. The resulting complex (device plus behaviornot forgetting context) could eventually become
habitual or fossilized, in Vygotskys term (1978: 68), be moved out of
awareness, possibly with no observable trace of the mediating means;
the act, subsuming its exterior development, became seemingly an
essential characteristic of the person.6
Vygotskys attention to the achievement of freedom via discipline, that
is freedom from the random stimuli of the environment and discipline by
the direction of oneself through signs, emphasized the signicance of
cultural forms. Cultural forms were the creation of the collective, and
through these forms a second world could be articulated. By constructing an unseen, a spoken if not imaginary, world for its agentswhich as
scientic concepts could achieve maximum distance from the directly
experienced physical stimulihumans vitiated external exigency.
Vygotskys appreciation of the collective dimensions of human life also
176
Ex
am
Co
py
Authoring Selves
177
Ex
am
Co
py
humans interact these cultural forms (Wertsch, Minick, and Arns 1984).
And so we miss the social struggles and conicts that drive aspects of
inner speech. Vygotsky recognized differences between inner speech
(speech for ones self), and social speech (speech for others), and he
thus recognized a tension, for example, in moving from inner to social
speech. But the tension lay in such contrasts as those between the
sense of a word or phrase for ones self, the connotations and memories
of the contexts of the words use, and the meaning of a word or phrase
for generalized others. Bakhtins view of the social and the fusion of the
social with cultural forms was much more complex.
Bakhtin was keenly aware that speech formssocial languages,
speech genreswere neither neutral with regard to values and world
views nor a simple means of expressing thoughts, leaving off the subtexts
of power and stratication. Vygotsky quite appropriately emphasized the
potential of words as tools, as bootstraps by which one could pull
oneself up to another form of behavior,8 but he ignored the conicts and
struggles, the whole history of contested practices now emblematized
and brought along with the tools. Vygotskys tools, according to Bakhtins
vision of human expression, came marked with social division and the
often incompatible perspectives attached to them.
To appreciate the difference between the two it is also necessary to
recall Bakhtins insistence on dialogism, addressivity and answerability.
Vygotskian psychology, especially its development by the Kharkov line
of the sociohistorical school now referred to as activity theory, emphasized the situatedness of thought and feeling and their developmental
courses over the lifetime. But, where Bakhtin emphasized the alwayscontinuing activity of producing meaning in dialogue, activity in the
sociohistorical school refers to any historically specic, collectively developed or conventionalized, social endeavor such as work. Where Bakhtin emphasized a global self-fashioning, or authoring of the self, the
tasks that Vygotsky considered, such as remembering to do something
(Vygotsky 1978) or controlling ones emotions in a particular situation
(Vygotsky 1987b), were more varied and more everyday.
It is true that, writing with and against the formalists, Vygotsky (1986)
did discuss monologic versus dialogic forms of (inner) speech, but he
simply did not give inner speech the dialogic quality that Bakhtin did.
Inner speech was, for Vygotsky, only possible because of social speech,
and thus dialogical in its developmental origins. But Vygotsky gave more
178
py
Ex
am
Co
Vygotsky wrote little about the self, at least as far as we are aware. If we
extrapolate from his position, especially his emphasis on semiotic mediation, however, we nd no incompatibilities with the writings of Bakhtin
on the subject.10 In fact, the implications of Vygotskys work seem to
complement Bakhtins position. In Bakhtins account of self-authoring,
the I-for-myself realizes itself explicitly in words and categories, naming the I-for-others and the other-in-myself. As we have argued,
following Vygotsky, such symbols for self may become important in attempts to control or modify ones behavior. The AA member who comes
to identify herself as a non-drinking alcoholic may use the tokens of that
identity, such as the number of colored chips she has collected, to tell
herself parts of her personal story, to keep herself from taking a drink.
The categories of the other not only nalize the self, putting closure on
what is actually open-ended, but also guide the future self in its activity.
They direct the trajectory of the self-process, becoming part of what we
call history-in-person.
Bakhtin has more to offer. For him, the voices, the symbols, are socially inscribed and heteroglossic. Often the voices are in conict. The
AA member may hear the voices of other members, but she also hears
the voices of her friends who still drink: Oh, come on, have a drink.
And it is unlikely that the member will be able to avoid situations in
which these voices, which are reminders of earlier selves, promote divergent actions. These voices will have to be put together in some way. The
orchestration of such voices, which Bakhtin calls self-authoring, thus is
a complicated matter indeed. Or, in Vygotskys terms, semiotic mediation, made over into a matter of voice, looks less like a smooth steering
mechanism and more like a self-contest.
Consider Sandy, one of the college women introduced in Chapter 5. In
her talking diary interviews we discern several voices, some of which
Sandy identied with and others with which she was at odds, the voices
Authoring Selves
179
of critics. Sandy was upset by the critical talk. She had come to the
university from another part of the country and, from what she said,
found her fellow students ideas of attractiveness unfamiliar:
Co
py
am
Sandy went on to say that the same forces made her feel that she was
not a lady just because she cursed when she got angry. As she reported
her thoughts and feelings, the criticisms were remembered in (took on)
the voices of her peers. She seemed to reexperience the comparison of
herself to an ideal through the questions and criticisms of her peers.
These critics had become an internal interlocutor, which invidiously
compared her to the ideal and to whose charges she formulated answers
and defenses (Holland 1988).11
Much of Bakhtins most fascinating work is devoted to styles of
authorship in literary genres. It was characteristic of the novel, as Bakhtin conceived it, that the authors position was articulated not through
explicit statements but through the juxtaposition, the orchestration, of
the voices and performances of the novels characters:
Ex
The author does not speak in a given language (from which he distances himself to a greater or lesser degree), but he speaks, as it were,
through language, a language that has somehow more or less materialized, become objectivized, that he merely ventriloquates.
The prose writer as a novelist does not strip away the intentions of
others from the heteroglot language of his works, he does not violate
those socio-ideological cultural horizons (big and little worlds) that
open up behind heteroglot languagesrather he welcomes them into
his work. The prose writer makes use of words that are already populated with the social intentions of others and compels them to serve his
own new intentions, to serve a second master. Therefore the intentions
of the prose writer are refracted, and refracted at different angles, de-
180
am
Co
py
Ex
[social] Find out what her resources are. A girl like this is going to
need outside resources. Does she have any? A lot of times, surprisingly
enough, they have. Surprisingly enough, they very often may have
friends that youre unaware of, that theyre unaware of!
[therapeutic] But, work out with her, again, trying to get her to take
as much control as she can of her life. What are we going to do?
and, again, set up the rules. Set up the consistency and rules. Try to
understand that just because her illness, her manifestation of illness
Authoring Selves
181
Co
py
tends to be less pleasant than your chronic schizs, doesnt make her any
less safe.
So what does she want to do about the divorce? Does she want to
divorce this guy? [social] Usually, right off, they dont have any money.
Where is she going to live? So, with her, I would start off with much
more practical considerations. Where are you going to live? What are
we going to do? What are the options? Where can you go? Can you go
to your family? [and administrative] Because if shes going to go to
South Carolina to live with her family, then were not going to do
anything with this lady except get her to South Carolina.
[medical/therapeutic] So a patient like this, shes very easily depressed and very unstable. Shes going to need stability before she needs
anything else, so my rst priority with her would be to nd some way
to get her stabilized.
[social] I dont mean psychiatrically stabilized, I mean socially stabilized. [medical/therapeutic] This is somebody who, youre not going to
x the psychiatric problems, for the next fteen years, at least, even if
shes cooperative. And I dont mean that in a mean way, but that the
reason shes unstable is that obviouslyher mom spent the last year in
a hospital suffering from psychotic depression[and social] basic lack
of security. Husband losing a job; shes going to bounce off the walls
and be dead.
Ex
am
For virtually all the people interviewed, the womans case was a hard
problem. Few expressed condence that any treatment they could devise
would prove effective, and most accounts reect that difdence. Many
lack an authorial center, wandering substantially from task to task and
discursively crossing the vocations conventionally responsible for these
tasks. Others take an authorial stance that directly reports, without
adopting or valuing any one interrelationship, the steps each vocation
might take and the reasons for their failure.
The therapist quoted was an exception, and it is not surprising that
she was considered an expert with borderlinesthe diagnosis most often
evoked by the hypothetical case. Throughout the case recitation she
relates the vocations with little commentary. She presents each with
respect, as a serious participant, but gives clear weight to the sociological
standpoint. She begins and ends from that perspective, she interrupts
speaking from the other vocations to return to social concerns, and, at
times, she mixes (in Bakhtins term, hybridizes) the other vocations
182
Co
py
discourse with the social. The formal ways of relating social languages,
evident in this therapists speech, provide a powerful means to outsidenessa way of standing apart from immediate experience that yet
denes it as ours by the very arrangement that relates it. It is utterly
characteristic of self-identication under a regime of heteroglossia.
Mental health workers have long been exposed to heteroglossia, a
cacophony of different languages and perspectives. They are faced with
the choice of either taking on these different languages and perspectives willy-nilly or developing a more or less stable authorial stance, a
voice that over time speaks categorically and/or orchestrates the different
voices in roughly comparable ways. A rst step toward an authorial
stance, one already mastered by this therapist, is the creation of internally persuasive discoursesexternal or authoritative speech that has
been married to ones own:
Ex
am
Authoring Selves
183
Co
py
Ex
am
184
Ex
am
Co
py
Authoring Selves
185
py
differentiated conception of sociality, both of its cultural means (sociolects and speech genres) and of its actual, localized articulation (the
sociolinguistics of utterance). Vygotsky highlighted the ways in which
language and other cultural forms are socially interacted and, in many
cases, taken in and made into personal tools for affecting ones own
behavior. Bakhtin reminded us that these forms are by no means taken in
as socially neutral:
Co
Ex
am
Vygotsky saw the escape from the tyranny of environmental and internal stimuli as coming through the gift of collective symbols wielded
toward the self. In Bakhtin, escape from being ventriloquated by rst one
and then another authoritative voice comes through the orchestration
of and adoption of stances toward these voices, arrangements that are
themselves suggested (perhaps) by texts. Indeed, the complementarity is
apparent here. Had he studied Alcoholics Anonymous, Vygotsky might
have emphasized the life story as a sign by which an AA member comes
to turn himself from drinking and eventually toward a new habitual way
of responding to messages inviting him to drink. Bakhtin would have
weighted the life story more as a text that provides the AA member with
a model for responding to the multiple and conicting voices that speak
to him about drinking and what it means that he is drawn to drink. Both
enable us to see that consciousness and subjectivity are thoroughgoing
products of the collective life, but their paths to that vision take us to
different vantages on self-fashioning. Vygotsky leads us to look at a more
asocial, developmental effect of cultural forms, as mediating devices of
consciousness. Bakhtin leads us to capture the ongoing social struggles,
186
Ex
am
Co
py
Authoring Selves
187
py
Co
The Russian word ugol (coal, charcoal) has a denite and clear
meaning. It involves a black substance, most often having its origin in
wood, that is derived from the carbonization of trees. It involves a
substance having a denite chemical composition, the chief constituent
of which is the element C (carbon). However, the sense of the word
ugol can vary greatly for different people in different situations. For
the housewife, ugol is associated with something used for heating
the samovar or something used for heating the stove . . . For the artist
who wishes to use ugol (charcoal) for making a sketch, it is associated with the means he/she has for outlining a picture. And for the little
girl who has smudged her dress with coal, the word ugol carries an
unpleasant sense. It is something that has spoiled her dress, something
that evokes an affective feeling. (1981: 45)
am
Ex
Or, more briey: there is no such thing as experience outside of embodiment in signs . . . It is not experience that organizes expression, but the
other way aroundexpression organizes experience (85).14
Not only does the speaker depend upon the words of others to author
188
his own experience, he also must answer to, respond to, the social
relations between himself and his addressee in speaking socially:
py
Co
am
The immediate social situation and the broader social milieu wholly determineand determine from within, so to speakthe structure of an utterance. (86)
Ex
Utterances, that is, are constructed between socially related and thus
positioned persons. Since utterances organize experience (as the source
of the psyche itself), we are strongly affected by the position we are cast
into within interactions. Voloshinov (1986: 87) gives an example of
hunger and its expression. How hunger is expressed and therefore experienced depends upon ones social group and position, and upon the
immediate situation. Suppose you are a guest in an expensive hotel (here
we modify Voloshinovs example somewhat). Imagine that you enter
hungry and are kept waiting for your dinner order. Imagine how you
might express/experience the hunger. Or imagine yourself a political
protester, jailed and deprived of food long past mealtime. Would the
expression/experience of hunger be different from that in the expensive
hotel? Or imagine you are a host, deferring your own meal in order to
provide food for your guests. How would you express/experience your
own hunger in that situation? For Bakhtin and Voloshinov, moving from
inner to outer speech is a process in which the immediate social situation
Authoring Selves
189
Co
py
profoundly shapes the experience from within. Their position is reminiscent of the situational determinacy we discussed in Chapter 1. We see
peoples behavior/experience/expression conforming (in the sense of being created together) with the social situation.
In short, the task of answering to others is a signicant one. Bakhtins insistence on dialogism, the always present, always operating, always demanding job of being in dialogue with others, with ones environment, forces attention to the present situation and entails its
importance in the space of authoring. We are reminded how unlikely it
is that ones identities are ever settled, once and for all. Dialogism makes
clear that what we call identities remain dependent upon social relations and material conditions. If these relations and material conditions
change, they must be answered, and old answers about who one is
may be undone.
Development
Ex
am
It is not just the present condition of dialogue that is important to Bakhtin. There is history in the person, which also signicantly shapes social
activity. Voloshinov emphasizes, perhaps overemphasizes, the determination of utterance by the social situation. But he also postulates a feature of inner speech that he calls a stabilized social audience: Each
persons inner word and thought has its stabilized social audience that
comprises the environment in which reasons, motives, values, and so on
are fashioned (1986: 86).15 This stabilized social audience can be specic persons or more idealized ones.16 It is in this sense of an idealized
audience (like Meads generalized other) that Bakhtin and Voloshinov
speak of ideology: any cognitive thought whatever, even one in my
consciousness, in my psyche, comes into existence . . . with an orientation toward an ideological system of knowledge where that thought will
nd its place. My thought, in this sense, from the very start belongs to an
ideological system and is governed by its set of laws (1986: 35).
Ideology is not, however, an abstractum, held in the mind as a set of
propositions or in habit as a set of tropisms. It is instead a habituated,
gured world. So, though Bakhtin does not often speak to the point,17
there must be periods (and these periods may even be the majority)
during which ones authorial stance becomes stable, or, in our terms, an
identity becomes habituated, usual, common. These topics return us to
190
Co
py
Ex
am
Yet, despite the ordinary force of habituation, a developmental perspective must problematize development. As our ethnographic studies have
made clear, identity formation should not be taken for granted. As we
have seen, many actors are not sufciently engaged by the world of
romance, say, or that of Alcoholics Anonymous that they ever form much
of an identity relevant to the particular gured world, at least not for a
long time. Sandys concern with her peers remarks about her anomalous
behavior and lack of attractiveness faded with time. Instead, her life
became focused around a particular friend. She and the friend moved
away from campus life, and Sandy eventually quit school. Years later, in
the follow-up interview, we discovered that she had only recently returned to the university and to the world of romance and attractiveness
that she had eschewed.
Similarly, some participants in AA never identied enough to attend
meetings faithfully or to produce an interpretation of their lives that
accorded with the genre performed in the meetings. It is folly to assume
that members of a voluntary group, or even members of an involuntaryan ethnic or racialgroup are uniform in their identities (see
Rouse 1995). There may be far less to participation than meets the eye.
In other cases there is more to participation than might be suspected.
As we shall see in Chapters 10 and 12, many of the Naudadan women
who participated in the Tij festival developed identities and senses of
Authoring Selves
191
Ex
am
Co
py
Co
py
Ex
am
193
am
Co
py
The Project
Ex
The Triangle Mental Health Survey, from which the case we report here is
drawn, had two purposes.1 The rst was to reconstruct the ways in
which people who suffer from severe and persistent mental disorders
learn to survive economically and socially. It was a study of subsistence
strategies, of personal economiessomething familiar to many anthropologists (such as Spradley 1970). We recruited people who were, so to
speak, early in the career of their illness, those to whom the potentially
damaging effects of mental illness were yet new. We followed each participant for two years, doing a formal interview every six months.
The rst, third, and fth of these interviews were broad and long
survey instruments. We collected information on employment history,
the everyday experience of work, job seeking, working and nancial
194
Ex
am
Co
py
195
Co
py
Ex
am
196
Ex
am
Co
py
study:3 (1) the schizophrenias and other psychotic disorders, (2) major
affective disorders, (3) anxiety disorders, and (4) personality disorders.
The rst category, schizophrenias, designates severe disturbances of cognition, especially social cognition, and of perception. The extreme or
orid manifestations of schizophrenia, once called hebephrenia and
now simply disorganized schizophrenia, are the prototypic gures of
the mad person. This group is also known as thought disorders, in contrast with the second large category, affective disorders. Affective disorder
is characterized by severe disturbances of mood or emotionality, and the
most important variants are major depressive disorder (major depression) and bipolar affective disorder (manic-depression).
There is considerable overlap between these two categories when they
are attributed to people by diagnosis on the basis of symptoms. Persons
with schizophrenia have frequent (and even characteristic) disturbances
of emotional expression, called inappropriate (silly) or at (monotonous or uninected) affect. Similarly, persons with affective disorders
often exhibit some psychotic behaviors: delusions, hallucinations, and
confused thinking. Psychiatrists distinguish the two by judging the relative pervasiveness and often the persistence of the two symptomatic
types. It is not uncommon, as we shall see in Rogers case, for a person to
receive a diagnosis of thought disorder on one occasion and affective
disorder on another, especially when different diagnosticians weigh the
evidence.
The last two groups differ from the rst two by the presumed severity
of their effects and by their causes, their etiology. Anxiety disorders (in
which for convenience I also include dissociative, somatoform, and adjustment disorders) and personality disorders are widely conceived to be
less disabling and often less enduring conditions. They are also thought
to arise more from psychological and social (situational) causes than
from physiological dysfunction. Experience and learning, especially under conditions of extreme psychological stress or trauma, are at the root
of these disorders;4 they are simply secondary or contingent to schizophrenias and affective disorders, whose causes are ordinarily thought to
be neurological.
Anxiety disorders span much of what used to be termed neuroses in
the psychodynamic literature. Persons with anxiety disorders often respond favorably to certain medications, the widely used anxiolytics or
minor tranquilizers (distinguished from the antipsychotics or major
197
Ex
am
Co
py
tranquilizers, like Thorazine), of which Xanax and Valium are the best
known. Hence, and despite the larger role accorded to environmental
factors in their etiology, anxiety disorders are considered to have a neurological substrate, to involve a physiological impairment. They are arrayed as specic, limited or episodic, clinical syndromes with the
thought and affective disorders on what is called Axis I in the DSM.
Personality disorders are yet again different. They are stable but
maladaptive patterns of relation to ones environment (and oneself)
whose etiology is regarded to be primarily developmental in the psychological sense, a matter of learning during infancy and early childhood.
They are global disorders of peoples cognitive, affective, and practical
organizations, that is, their personalities as this discourse denes
them. Their formation precedes, coexists with, and may outlast the various clinical disorders. Beginning with the third edition of the DSM, the
personality disorders were assigned to a second axis, afrming their
distinction from other disorders. They are gured, in the abstract form of
the diagnostic space, to vary independently of the clinical disorders of
Axis I.
Ideally, any diagnosed person should be described along both axes.
Practically, however, psychiatrists focus on one aspect or the other and
accord one or the other precedence in treatment. It is unusual for a
person with schizophrenia to be diagnosed with a personality disorder,
and rarer still for such a disorder to be given much time in treatment.
Schizophrenia is taken to be the more important problem because it is
the more serious illness. In contrast, an anxiety disorder that coexists
with one of the severe personality disorders may receive little attention
beyond a drug prescription.5
This system of psychiatric classication is a phenomenological or descriptive system. The types of disorder are differentiated according to
observed constellations of symptoms called syndromes. The ideology of
psychiatry maintains that people are distinct from their illnesses, insofar as the illnesses are presumed to originate from somatic dysfunctions,
that is, diseases of the brain. Still, because the illnesses are noticeable
from the ways people behave, psychiatric categories inevitably identify
personae, recognizable modes of activitywhat I call signatures of
practice. There is an understandable confusion, an elision, that pervades
not only popular discourse but also the practical and informal discourse
of professionals. Persons diagnosed with schizophrenia become schizo-
198
Ex
am
Co
py
199
am
Co
py
The Case
Ex
Roger at our rst meeting was a rather short and rotund man of thirtythree. He looked the part of a prosperous middle-class salaried worker.
He was well kempt and well dressed and showed few of the irregularities
of self-care that were apparent among other patients. Roger did not have
obvious thought disorders, behavioral abnormalities, or disturbances of
mood. His affectemotional tone of speech and activityseemed, on
observation, full and appropriate to his situations. It was hard to see why
Roger was on the ward at alluntil you spoke with him. Roger had a bad
case of alien voice. He spoke loudly, with little inection, yet with a force
and speed that intimated agitation or excitement. His tone of voice often
did not match his other means of expression, either gestural or facial.
200
Co
py
There was something at odds about Roger. Although a college graduate, he had been consistently underemployed during the ten years he had
worked. He was married, throughout the time I met with him, to a
psychiatric nurse. I rst interviewed him during his fourth psychiatric
hospitalization.
The previous year had been a hard one for Roger. He had suffered
several setbacks at work, including a transfer that he regarded as a demotion. His marriage had gone through a shaky period after four years of
relative tranquillity. According to his own assessment, Roger turned suicidal because he could not handle the stress of his job, of his and other
peoples expectations:
am
Yeah, I justracing thoughts and fearful thoughts and you feel closed
in and I cant do this job another minute, and yeah they had me on
something called the mini-stacker. And these big boxes would come
down with hundreds of parts in them. I had to count all the parts;
theyre in bags, some of them werent in bags. Then I had to put them
on another conveyer belt, punch in a few things, and it would take
them to the racks and stick them up in stock. But some days youd
stand around an hour. Your technician is looking at you the whole time.
And I dont know what to do. And hell give me some racks to ll and
Ive never done them before. And it just created a lot of tension, him
looking at me all the time. You know, and other days youve got so
much on that conveyer belt, its backed up around the corner someplace. [It changes so much] and I like something steady.
Ex
Three times that year he made attempts on his own life and each time
was hospitalized on the psychiatric ward of the local hospital. These
were short stays. Once in the hospital Roger stabilized quickly and soon
left to return to work.
At our rst interview Roger gave the impression of someone who had
found an explanation of his problems that he could accept: Its a major
psychiatric illness . . . A sort of thinking and feeling disorder. I cant
always trust what Im thinking and feeling. He remembered, in a garbled way, the names the doctor had told him: Obsessive-compulsive
disorder. Bipolar. Schizoid-affective personality disorder. But he preferred to call his illness neurotic depression.
After this discharge Roger was placed on medical disability by his
employer. As time went on he bought into the therapeutic system in a big
201
Co
py
Ex
am
202
Ex
am
Co
py
hospital ve times now. How many more times do I have to try? When I
last talked to Roger, eight months after he admitted this secret wish, to be
older, he was still planning a return to college, a plan he had conceived
over a year before. He was better now and thought once again that he
could move back into a regular life.
Throughout our acquaintance Roger professed a mental illness without hesitation. His ideas about this illness, however, altered. Not only did
he learn more about psychiatric illness in general; his conception of the
nature of his own illness changed. By the second interview he had
adopted manic-depression, a combination of racing thoughts and
enduring depression: how about just a guy feels lousy and theres no
known reason? The lack of apparent reason for both his cognitive and
affective states clinched the argument for him: Im starting to believe
Im very manic-depressive. Over the weekend I was quite suicidal, and
there was no apparent reason. My wife was hereshes a psychiatric
nurse, so thats as good as anything. And she said, Youre recycling too
fast or something. You need another antidepressant. It had to be something within him, not outside and visible. At this point Roger focused
more upon his symptoms than upon any causal model of his illness. It
was enough for him that his illness was a medical or somatic condition
and not, as his parents seemed to suggest, a problem of character or will.
By the third interview, one year after the rst, Roger had again
modied his ideas about his psychological problems: Ive always
thought they were mainly chemically related and I still think they are.
But there is some personality. When youre growing up, I believethat
affected the way I . . . my behavior, my thinking patterns. That has not
changed. Its a combination of personality and chemical, thats what I
feel, more chemical though. After discharge from his baseline hospitalization Roger had begun working with a new psychiatrist. This doctor
told me that he had changed Rogers diagnosis and the emphasis of his
therapy. Previously Roger had carried a primary diagnosis of either bipolar disorder or schizoaffective disorder, depressed type.7 His new psychiatrist decided, putatively on the basis of psychological testing, that
Roger was basically borderline, that is, personality disordered. He had
told Roger his conclusion, and Roger had begun to take it to heart.
The next interview, six months later, found Roger still learning his
roles. In fact he reverted to speaking about his racing thoughts and
twisted, negative thoughts, which he carefully referred to mania and
203
Ex
am
Co
py
204
Co
py
full blown borderline . . . No. No, I got a book on it. I let my doctormy
psychiatristhe said its a good book, but I havent been sexually abused
as a child, I remember, nothing like that.
In the two years from our rst interview to our fth, then, Roger
consistently identied himself as a mentally ill participant in the world of
mental health care. But his ideas of his illness had deepened and broadened in the ways predicated by an ever fuller involvement in that world.
Rogers nal report of the extent to which his illness affected his life is no
surprise: It permeates you. Its everything, like friendships . . . its in me.
It affects everything. Everything from my relationship to God, who wont
heal me, to my wifetry to cheat on her, to my parentscall them
twice a day. I mean my best friend, I told his girlfriend he was seeing
somebody else, and, I mean Ive really screwed up lately. I uh, its just
its in my life. It affects my thinking and feeling, and my behavior. Its me.
Im who I am.
Ex
am
As Roger left the public world centered upon work and the day-to-day
accounting of common interaction, he entered into different means for
the making and interpretation of behavior. These psychiatric means are
not completely alien to the everyday, so inuential has medical practice
become. But the more removed one becomes from the ordinary arenas of
interaction, the more salient are these special technologies of the self.
Not all people who nd themselves so secluded agree with, or even
attend to, the psychiatric line. But their opposition or indifference leaves
them in the same ambit as those, like Roger, who accept it wholeheartedly. The power of social circumscription, what has been called role
constriction, sets persons with psychiatric disorders apart, despite their
wishes and sometimes considerable efforts to counteract it.8
There were other reasons for Rogers willingness to adopt psychiatric
ideas. Rogers inability to work was the central fact of his predicament in
the eyes of others. It was both the great puzzle and the great complication of his everyday life. Work is, in many social venues of the United
States, the central claim to personal competency and personal worth.
When work is denied us, that failure requires explanation, and the
explanation comes to serve as defense for our endangered personhood.
Roger devoted an inordinate amount of discursive labor to this subject,
205
am
Co
py
and his explanation reveals much about his local as well as our societys
world.
His mental illness obviously entered into a longstanding interchange
among Roger, his wife, and his family. His wife told me: Theres always
been a big competition in the family. And he was the one that went to
four years of college, and you know, everybody wanted him to be a
lawyer, and heres his brother who didnt go to any college and took a few
courses at IBM and has a very good position in IBM. Rogers failure
required justication if he was to reclaim some place of value among his
close associates. He received little help or understanding of his efforts, as
he himself admitted: Im very closely tied to my parents. I dont know
why. They neverIm probably trying to get what I never got from them.
I dont knowlove and understanding. All I got was criticism and you
can do better . . . They wonder why Im not at work now. They dont
understand mental illness. They think, you know, if you get off the pills,
get off this, everythingll be OK. This sense of competitiveness in economic achievement, the emphasis on self-control, the giving and withholding of affection as motivation toward achievement, are stereotypical
features of American middle-class family life. Rogers quite obvious
failure to meet these standards, and the consequent disapproval he met
from his family, was a lasting dilemma in his social life and for his
self-understanding.
If from his family Roger met expectations that he found hard to fulll,
he encountered an opposing pressure from his wife (and his psychiatrist). She told me:
Ex
When he sees a job in the paper that he really would want, I have to
think in my mind, is he really going to be able to perform that type of
work, and yet I dont want to be the one to be the bad guy and say
Roger, I dont think you can really do that. You know, I think he ought
to look into job opportunities as hes been doing, but I think theres
some things that hes just never going to be able to do. And until he
goes and applies for these jobs and realizes hes not qualied hes, you
know, its hard for him to accept that.
She saw her task as helping Roger lower his expectations about employment, in line with her notions of the functional impairment that mental
disorders cause. From her stance as a psychiatric nurse, she had adopted
in her domestic relations both the separation between Roger and his
206
Ex
am
Co
py
illness and the power of illness over person that is the popular way of
guring this separation. But this toleration too was a problem for Roger.
With his family, the distress that mental disorder caused Roger disappeared in the disguise of Rogers defective will. With his wife, Rogers
own thoughts, feelings, and interests disappeared within the manifestations of illness.
It is not illness itself but the interrelations of various elds of practice
that determine the possibilities of self-expression. It is easy to guess what
impelled Rogers conation of identity work and work in its usual sense.
How Roger used psychiatric notions strategically in his everyday relations is rather more interesting. From his local world, shaped by the
counterpositions and alliances among his wife, psychiatrist, parents (and
silently, his brother), and employer, Roger crafted a response, which was
at once his identied place and his proper labor.
It was not a singular response. When speaking about his parents or his
employers and co-workers, Roger usually emphasized his manic-depression. Both medical psychiatry and much of popular psychological discourse conceive this illness, bipolar affective disorder, to be primarily a
somatic disorder, caused by a dysfunction of neurotransmission. Susceptibility to the illness is also thought to be genetically based. Thus having
manic-depression is not ones own fault. Roger opposed its unwilled
disruption of his own capacities to his parents and co-workers interpretation that he lacked the willpower or the energy to change his misbehavior. He borrowed the authority of medicine to answer other peoples
claims against him. At the same time, the persuasiveness of this psychiatric identity increased as it provided Roger with a way to legitimate his
past activity and to maintain the relationships he valued. It is appropriate, when one is aficted by a disease that incapacitates, for ones therapy
to become ones entire work. So Roger justied his withdrawal from the
world of employment by his identity as manic-depressive.
This construction drew authority from explicitly biological models of
bipolar disorder to oppose Rogers parents ethnopsychology of will.
Unlike the latter, which locates disorder as misbehavior, within the realm
of self-control, Rogers adopted understanding blamed no person, only
his neurophysiology. It both signaled and consequently encouraged the
restitution of his relationships, with himself, his wife (who shared this
assessment of his disorder), and even his parents. Moreover, it explained
the propriety of Rogers disability and the promise of his (chemo)thera-
207
Ex
am
Co
py
208
Ex
am
Co
py
will to his parents, according to the developmental etiologies conventional to these personality disorders. Rogers control over his social misbehavior was thus vitiated, his actions recast into a reenactment of an
originally pathological relation of parents to child. Work has little to do
with this settling of personal relationships, and Rogers talk of it did not
coincide with his borderline discourse. Its absence may also have been
strategically signicantthough such an attribution is always chancy.
Work disability is ordinarily associated with only the most severe personality disorder, which Roger did not avow. His borderline identication could not serve him, and was not invoked by this crucial problematic.
Hence Rogers bipolar and borderline identities participated in different social and imaginative landscapes. They were differently addressed
and differently answerable, in Bakhtins terms, yet they were not thoroughly separable. A gure in the realm of popular psychology united
them: the idea of stress: [My doctor] said depression and borderline
personality disorder. Thats what he labeled it as. And I cant handle
stress. We agree on that. Though Roger clearly described the conditions
of his work and personal life in terms any reader would call stressful, he
did not use the word itself until the third interview (just quoted). The
context was one in which he was asked to represent his doctors understanding of his illness. Stress provided the gurative grounds of their
agreement. Over the next year Roger increasingly used the notion of
stress as a point of interchange not only between the differing understandings afforded by his dialogue with psychiatry but also between his
(ever more psychiatrically informed) conceptions and those of his parents and friends: [My parents] say, You cant take . . . well, they nally
realized I cant take stress, and they think Im a little lazy. Thats what
they think.
This usage is not idiosyncratic. Just as, in contemporary Euroamerican
social life, a common medium for material interchanges has developed in
the form of money, so too a common medium for psychic interchanges
has developed under the rubric of stress. The concept takes a negative
mode, somewhat like impedance, resistance, or load in engineering,
and it predicates a differential between inner and outer, personal and
public economies. In the metaphorical world of architectonics (using
Bakhtins Kantian terminology) the person or individual is conceived
as a integral system of balances among constituents, as conditioned by its
environments. When changes of state occur, such as when an inter-
209
Ex
am
Co
py
change with the environment takes place, the equilibrium of the system
is necessarily disrupted.
In Rogers words: And, like I said, you dont know what feeling is
normal, so its a little bit of both, really. But mainly irrational thinking.
Then I get under stress. Im thinking irrationally and feeling fearful. So
its really a combination that kicks in under stress. Stress is the (retrospective) measure of effort requisite to reestablish the (interior) balance
of the person, the cost of living in alterable circumstances. Projectively, it
is the measure of an environments potential disequilibrating effect. The
notion was popularized in psychology by Selye (1956), though it has
been extended from its original and calculable physiological settings to
less measurable, qualitative changes of psychological state.9
Stress talk is a genre of both popular and professional psychologies,
whose chronotopeBakhtins phrase for the denitive gured world of a
form of discourseis the abstract landscape just described. Different
persons, different identied systems, are presumed to have differing susceptibilities to stress. (Roger said: My stress tolerance is very low. I dont
know why my stress tolerance is so low. Ive never gured that out.)
This susceptibility may come from either genetic causes or historical
(developmental) ones. Likewise, different environments predicate differing stresses, for any number of reasons. In order to calculate actual
stress, one must know both functional components: systemic capability and environmental energetics. At this abstract level, the gured world
of stress unites rst the biological and sociological conditions of mental
illnesses and then the different forms of illness as so many products of
these generic conditions. Stress warrants that, no matter what variant
illnesses one has, there exists a common ground for them in the relation
of body to social world. As Roger told me: And the other thing is
sensitivity to stress, and depression, and fear, and obsession. Theyre all
tied in. When I get stressful, depression, fear, and obsessional thinking
kick right in, so I cant take much stress. It also warrants, by extension,
the integrity of a personI cant take much stressinhabited by the
personae named by these illnesses.
210
Ex
am
Co
py
211
Ex
am
Co
py
212
to sets of our associates, our multiple others (see Gergen 1994). That is a
story we will have to leave to another time.
Ex
am
Co
py
Michel Foucault has taught us that historical and political actions, on the
grand scale, created rst insanity and then mental illness from madness, a notion of behavioral and cognitive aberration hardly divorced
from everyday life. We must begin to amend his vision at the point where
it seems whole, at the point where the variety of the forms of life, which
after all was one of Foucaults motives, becomes subsumed in the habitual ordering of these forms. When it is forgotten that such an order must
be reproduced, when it is acknowledged that the reproductions themselves are identical, then one must think again. Foucault must always be
brought to contend against himself.
It is also a mistake to concentrate too much upon the course of discipline, for example, of interchanges that move only from therapist to
client, however fully explored. As Rogers and my other case studies
show, people participate in several discourses and elds of activity relevant to their psychological identities. They attend, besides the formal
therapeutic activities of hospitals and mental health centers, self-help,
support, and advocacy groups that are more loosely connected to the
institutional psychiatric apparatus. The mass media also provide a substantial and less regular means toward psychological self-formation. Selfhelp and popular psychological literature and televised talk shows and
documentaries take the discursive and practical subjects of psychiatry
and medicine into a realm where they associate and contend with forms
of subjectivity and agency created and preserved under different social
and cultural worlds.10 And, while these means are one important vehicle
of the medicalization of everyday life, they are also an opportunity for
the transguration of the properly medical, for what Bakhtin called the
carnivalization of authoritative discourse. We will return to this interplay
of gured worlds in Chapter 11.
Finally, if one penetrates even further into the underlife (Goffman
1961) of psychiatry, one reaches common parlance and the cultural
subworlds that persons with mental disorders create among themselves
and with consociates of other practical elds. What we call the everyday,
or everyday practice, is a reality that is everywhere diverse and at the
same time substantially whole. That is to say, it is composed within the
interrelations of many specic practices. Any one instance of the every-
213
Ex
am
Co
py
10
Co
py
Authoring Oneself as a
Woman in Nepal
Ex
am
215
Co
py
ings about how women should be and act.2 Women enacted this gured
world and its identity of the good Hindu woman in many ways in their
everyday lives.
But a closer look suggested that women also felt anger and resentment toward the ways this narrativized world dened them as women.
Disrupting currents were also evident in relational aspects of identity.
Skinners research showed how young girls and women developed a
sense of their position relative to others in the social world, a sense that
as women they were entitled to, or denied, access to certain spaces and
activities. There were movements into, and thus contestations with, the
positional identity associated with the good Hindu woman. The
womens protests exemplied these contestations of self and of gender
relations. The womens complex and contested self-understandings developed and were produced in particular social, historical, and cultural
sites or activities, and their development allowed good Naudadan
women to rapidly transform into angry, active protesters who called their
treatment into question through their words and deeds.
Ex
am
Skinners research in Naudada focused on childrens roles in the coproduction and reproduction of gender and caste identities and relations.
Skinner examined the organization, contexts, and content of socialization activities in which children participated and the words and actions
of thirty boys and girls, aged eight to eighteen, as they responded to and
co-created these structures, activities, and cultural knowledge. We will
concentrate here on the ten girls she followed most closely, and on what
they conveyed to her about their lives in daily encounters, tape-recorded
interviews, and, for the literate ones, written accounts.
The girls often portrayed themselves as good workers, good girls, and
obedient and honorable daughters. These identities relevant to work,
gender, and family were central ones for females in Naudada, and were
gured by the Brahmanical model of the expected life path for women.
When Skinner asked them to describe themselves, most girls recited the
good habits they had and the bad ones they avoided. A typical response
included most of the following characteristics and behaviors: I am a
good girl. I love those who are smaller than me. I obey my parents. I
never tell a lie; I always speak the truth. I get along with others. I dont
216
Ex
am
Co
py
talk unnecessarily with boys, and I dont quarrel or scold others. I dont
steal from others elds. I stay in the house and do my work. I do my
studies. I only get angry if someone scolds me.
Parbati, a thirteen-year-old Damai girl (Damai is a lower caste considered untouchable),3 described herself this way: I am a very good girl. I
dont fool around with others . . . I am very good . . . I dont speak that
much also. I will say Namaskar, didi (Greetings, older sister) on the
spot when I meet you. I am like that. I am very good. I dont even like to
fool around much. In my being, I am very good. I do my own work by
myself. And Muna, a Damai girl of fourteen, said: I dont speak lies, and
when somebody speaks a lie against me, I get furious, but I dont try to
pick ghts . . . I dont get angry . . . I have lesser quarrels and I dont
speak nonsense. These self-descriptions did not vary much by caste or
socioeconomic status. Here is Maiya, an eleven-year-old Chetri girl: I
am a good, nice girl. I dont get mad at anyone. I dont ght. I dont steal
. . . I dont deceive anyone and dont lie.
The girls responses had a certain canned quality. They were recitations that varied little in content or format. In these self-descriptions the
girls were rehearsing themselves in relation to the gured world of the
expected life path of the good Hindu woman. In daily life and in rituals
experienced in childhood and beyond, girls were presented with a variety of messages related to what was expected of them as women. Most
socialization contexts promoted the notion of a good woman, one who
follows the ideal life path as set out in Brahmanical writings and teachingsthe dominant ideology of gender identities, roles, and relationships in Naudada as in other Hindu areas of Nepal and India. The model
presumed that Hindu women, except in cases of bad luck or bad morals,
would follow a particular life path (see Bennett 1976, 1983; Caplan
1985; Das 1979; Skinner 1989, 1990; Stone 1978). The generic womans
roles in this gured world were family-centered, and the favored characteristics were those which supported the patriarchal family.
In the storyline envisioned in this world, a girl is rst a daughter and
a sister. She grows up surrounded by relatives who urge her to cultivate
the habits that will mark her as a good daughter, wife, and daughter-inlaw. From their teachings and scoldings she learns to be a hard worker,
obedient and respectful to elders, and shy, gentle, and virtuous. In the
next stage of the life path she is married soon after she reaches puberty.
With marriage she becomes a daughter-in-law, a wife, and eventually a
217
Ex
am
Co
py
mother. She is hard-working, faithful and devoted to her husband, obedient and helpful to her mother-in-law, and a respectable woman in the
community. With the birth of children, especially sons, she acquires a
valued identitywhat some have called the central or prototypical identity of women: that of mother (Stone 1978). A woman who bears sons
proves herself to be a good woman with a good fate. Finally, as a motherin-law, a position accorded higher status than other female roles in the
family, she can direct and control the lives of her daughters-in-law. At the
end of the life path, ideally, a woman never becomes a widow. A good and
virtuous woman, through ritual observance and daily practice, ensures
the health and long life of her husband and dies before him.
Women in Naudada were interpreted and evaluated against this
narrativized world with its ideal woman and her life course. Those who
deviated from the life path of the good woman were judged to be aberrant and problematic in some way. Women who withheld their labor
from domestic and agricultural tasks, who gossiped about their husbands shortcomings, committed adultery, contradicted their mothers-inlaw, did not give birth to sons, or were widowed were the subjects of
gossip. Good women labored for the benet of their households. Good
women never talked unnecessarily or wandered about to malinger, gossip, or irt.
Within this gured world, women who deviated from the life path did
so because they were intrinsically bad or the victims of bad luck. A
woman who did not have children, for example, was presumed to be
barren, and this condition was seen as a punishment for her misdeeds in
a previous life. Widows, too, had fallen off the expected life path. They
had the bad fate to outlive their husbands. Widows were to be pitied, but
they were sometimes feared as witches.
Talk about bad or sinful women was part of daily conversation, a
great deal of which included evaluations of self and others in relation to
this gured world. Devi, a Chetri woman in her late twenties, talking
with Skinner about women they both knew, explained that one was a
nathi (a irt or a woman who goes with men other than her husband).
Another was a papini (female sinner) because she did not feed her grandchildren while her daughter-in-law was working long days in the elds.
One of Devis neighbors was a bad woman (naramro aimai) because
she was very jealous of others and mistreated her father, who lived with
her. The many negative types that commonly gured in such conversa-
218
Ex
am
Co
py
219
Ex
am
Co
py
This evaluative discourse created an inner voice of censure and divided women from one another. Aruna, a Damai girl of fourteen, reported that anyone, even a close girlfriend, would say a girl was bad if
she went to a boys house. Kamala, a fourteen-year-old Chetri girl, complained that she could not show her anger because others would say,
How angry that daughter seems to be. Tika, a Damai girl of fteen,
described herself as being on a straight line. Then she talked about a
woman who had run away with her husbands brother: It is better to
take a straight line than to do such a scandalous thing. A good wife stays
with her husband; a bad one leaves and goes with another. Kamala,
talking about the same event, said others were saying that this woman
was a kukurni (female dog) and had spoiled the prestige/honor (ijjat) of
her family.
It appears that these girls not only knew the expected life path and the
behaviors that counted as those of a good woman but also embraced
these concepts and behaviors as ways to dene themselves. They were
gured by this world, valuing themselves and others in its terms. They
desired to be and be seen by others as good selves. Their appreciation of
the gured world was not a product of its intrinsic persuasiveness, however. It was not so much that they were drawn to the image of the good
woman as that they were backing into it to avoid negative evaluations. For example, Kamala and her friends experienced many scoldings in which they heard evaluations of themselves and others. They
cared about what other people thought of them, and they did not wish to
dishonor their families. They tried to avoid behaviors that would categorize them as a bad type. In self-censoring their actions this way, they
backed into attachments to good and valued identities, and developed
claims to being good daughters and future daughters-in-law. Kamala said
she and her friends often heard women talking about what made a good
wife and daughter-in-law:
A good wife never criticizes her husband, and she never complains
about her husband to other people . . . A good daughter-in-law always
gets up early in the morning, and she does all the work she has to and
obeys her mother-in-law. She obeys her husband. She does not run
away to her natal home. She never steals to eat, and she does not steal
corn that grows in anothers eld. Daughters-in-law are not good if they
do not obey their mothers-in-law or if they move about here and there.
They do whatever they like. They steal, and they spend their time at
others houses. They go to festivals sometimes.
220
Ex
am
Co
py
Kamala thought that, if she had to get married, she would be a good
daughter-in-law, but she recognized that it would be very difcult: One
has to work very hard. We all have to act good. We are not supposed to
quarrel, lie, or steal. At home, we may not obey our parents all the time,
but we must obey at our mother-in-laws. A friend of Kamalas added
that women whose husbands beat them should just take it.
As portrayed so far, the Naudadan girls seem to have been totally
absorbed in all that the gured world promoted for women in their
domestic life path. The reproduction of patterns of gender relations practiced by previous generations seemed assured. From the comments we
have quoted, we might assume the girls accepted the life path and were
committed to its views of marriage and their roles as daughters-in-law
and wives, or, at least, that they acquiesced to their fate and silently
complied with the dominant ideology, as some authors have suggested
South Asian Hindu women do (see Dhruvarajan 1989). Their identities
as gured by this world seem to be their only views of self.
This picture of their self-understandings becomes more complex,
however, when we consider other things the girls said and did. Although
they laid claim to being good girls and good daughters and said that if
they married they would try to be good daughters-in-law and wives, they
also questioned the expected life path, were critical of the unequal treatment of men and women, expressed anger and sadness about the way
they were treated because they were female, and schemed to avoid marriage. They were gaining a sense of their position vis--vis others, noting
their relative lack of privilege and power. They were developing relational identities along with the gured identities.
Maiya, like many of the other girls, compared her life to that of her
brothers. In her rst interview, in response to the question Are you
happy to be a girl? Maiya replied that she would rather be a boy because
sons dont have to work hard. Girls have to carry water and cut grass,
while the sons can just sit and eat. Sunita, a ten-year-old Bahun, said she
had argued with her parents against the idea that only boys should go to
school. She told her parents, You are sending boys [to school], why not
send girls? Tika also complained: If I were a son, I would have been
allowed to study. Since I am a daughter, I did not get to study.
Muna, when asked what she thought about the future, replied: In the
future, now when I see others get married and have ghts in their new
home, um . . . why do we give daughters to anothers house? These
221
py
Co
am
In her song Muna voiced her dread and sadness over having to leave her
natal home and the mother she loved. In her husbands home she would
be the servant of her in-laws and work for them. Munas singing in
response to a question about her life was not unusual. The girls frequently resorted to song to express some sense of their lives, often a
sense that reected a critical view of their position as women in a patriarchal society. A particularly strong example is a song sung by Naudadan
schoolgirls in 1986 at the annual cultural performance at the local high
school:
Ex
Naudadan girls accounts, evaluations, narratives, and actions revealed images, understandings, and feelings about themselves that varied within and across contexts. The ways girls talked about themselves
and their lives and the ways they presented and represented themselves
were not consistent.4 Sometimes girls and women gave voice to culturally dominant notions of what the proper Hindu woman should be,
portraying themselves in terms of the ideal Hindu woman who accepts
her submissive and relatively powerless role vis--vis men. But they also,
222
Ex
am
Co
py
223
Ex
am
Co
py
224
py
Co
Scolding Activities
Ex
am
Scolding and cursing others were ubiquitous, everyday activities. Children were the frequent targets of scolding for transgressions and for
problems they caused their parents, other adults, and one another. Such
scolding generally began with an insult. Radione term for widow
was a common insult to hurl at any female, even a toddler. Nathi, loose
woman, was another. Radi! the scolder would scream. Then the girl
would be told the rules that she had violated. A typical scolding might
run as follows: Radi! What a daughter you are! After we have given you
food, this is all the work you have done! What have you done the whole
day? Why are you sitting there when the cattle need fodder and theres
no water in the house? Did I raise a lazy daughter?
Aruna, a Damai girl of thirteen, said her mother always scolded her,
saying radi when she did not do her work.7 Kamala, a Chetri girl of
fourteen, related that mothers sometimes called their daughters nathi,
scolding them, saying, Dont walk with boys this way. Muna said: I
feel very sad . . . when my father and mother scold me when I am not
doing any work, and get angry with me, when they say something and
scold, I feel very sad and unhappy. I feel sad when they scold my friends.
The incident that opens Chapter 6 presents a dramatic example of
scolding and its effects. To recapitulate, Skinner was recording songs one
day when three girls who were visiting her ran afoul of Tila Kumari, the
Bahun woman who lived in the house above hers. Tila Kumari walked
down to Skinners porch and yelled at the three Damai girls for eating
fruit and cutting fodder from her property:
You stupid girls. You are joking with us. Why do you cut grass from our
elds? Are you not ashamed? . . . Everyone has seen the guavas here,
225
py
but only you have eyes for them . . . Go to your husbands or fathers
eld to eat. You have no fear to cut the grass in anothers eld. After
telling your parents, I will weed your hair. You have no shame to show
those teeth of yours. I will take your molar teeth out. I will complain
like the daughter of Hari. Do not do unnecessary things here.
Ex
am
Co
The girls were upset and angry, particularly since Tila Kumari also went
to their houses and berated them and their families. They brought up the
scolding in a number of later interviews. As quoted earlier, Muna said
this about the scolding: We hadnt done anything. I cant gure out why
they made such a scandal out of it . . . I felt like crying. I couldnt
retaliate. I do not do such things. I thought, who was she to tell someone
like my mother such things? We did not get angry because we had not
done anything wrong. Thats why I felt bad and wanted to cry.
Evidently Muna heard implications about behavior she should avoid,
but she also heard and felt other things. For her, the context of the
knowledge was highly charged. If we can judge by her interviews, Muna
thought of the episode not only in terms of the contentthe dos and
donts of how to actbut also in terms of her own feelings about the
scolding. Muna recounted her process of reacting to the scolding. She
rehearsed seeing and hearing Tila Kumari, and she composed arguments
to defend her actions. She described feelings of pain, sadness, and a sense
of being unjustly accused. Tila Kumari became a dialogic other, envisioned and heard as a particular person, but also perhaps as a representative of the higher-caste Bahuns, who sometimes accused and insulted the lower castes.8 By replaying this event Muna was forming a
notion of her liability to the public meaning of certain acts, but at the
same time she was developing a sense of mistreatment and a sense of her
positioning as a lower-caste woman by a higher-caste woman.
Another example of the distinction between a developing knowledge
of the meaning of acts in the gured world and a personalized sense of
ones own positional identity can be seen in the way girls attained an
understanding of radi. Girls heard mothers-in-law and husbands call
daughters-in-law and wives radi for a variety of perceived offenses. Often
the girls themselves were the targets of scoldings in which radi was the
insult or epithet. Over time they abstracted the common meaning of the
term and came to know that a radi was a deviant type, one who had left
the life path and failed to be a good woman. Radi evoked and was under-
226
am
Co
py
Ex
Girls also witnessed scenes from everyday life that centered about gender
and kin relations. They were admonished as they went about their
household and agricultural chores to be good, obedient, hardworking,
and honorable daughters. At the same time, as daughters in the natal
home, they were given fewer rights and privileges than their brothers;
they saw their brothers getting more and better food and clothes, and
they often had to work in the elds while their brothers went to school.
227
Ex
am
Co
py
They were teased by their parents and others about being married away
beyond nine mountains, while their brothers, they knew, would stay at
home. They observed cases in which parents were in such a rush to
marry off their daughter that they chose a man who would cause her
many problems. They saw that an incoming daughter-in-law was expected to work long days at arduous tasks without complaint while the
mother-in-law sat idle or went out of her way to scold the newcomer.
They heard daily the expectations for wives: be respectful, virtuous,
and hardworking. The reward for all this servitude was supposed to be
the husbands affection and support for the wife and her children and the
wifes increasing status in the household. But girls knew of numerous
cases in the community in which women were abused or forsaken by
their husbands. They talked of marriage as an uncertain fate. A womans
husband might turn out to beat her and lose the family property through
drinking and gambling. If the wife scolded him, he might bring in a
co-wife, who would take away not only his affection but also scarce
resources.
Devi, a Chetri woman, often told her life story to the girls of Naudada.
Devis husband once had a good job with a local development agency. He
owned land, a house, and other wealth. But he drank the locally brewed
liquor to excess and gambled away all of the money and property. Devi
was powerless to stop him. He sold not only his wifes gold jewelry but
her pots and pans as well. He would drink until late at night, then come
home and beat her. Finally he deserted her and had not been seen for
years. But Devi still told her story, recounting to attentive girls the times
she would hide with a baby at her breast in the terraces below her house
until her drunken and enraged husband fell asleep.
While bad treatment was not the norm in Naudada, a girl heard about
and witnessed enough of it to make her worry that her own future
might include similar hardships. Everyday exhortations and evaluations
of womens behavior directed her to accept her roles without complaint
and to strive to obtain the favor of kin in both her parents and her
husbands home, but her observations provided her with images of the
pain possibly awaiting her on this life path. The expected life path may
have given her one means of envisioning her life, but it did not address
all the ways she thought and felt about her position as a female.
The Naudadan girls had clearly developed an identication with the
ideal woman of the gured world of womens lives; yet they also retained
228
py
senses from their experiences of what it meant to be a girl. These individual senses were gured publicly and objectied in critical commentary
that was produced and passed on by groups of women. This commentary,
as a cultural resource, provided an alternative meaning and a means of
both expressing and understanding ones gender identity.
am
Co
In Naudada and elsewhere in South Asia (see Raheja and Gold 1994;
Skinner et al. 1991, 1994), songs have been a primary way for women
to express their experiences and their awareness of their positioning
within the gured world of domestic life. The Tij festival is part of a
larger ritual complex called TijRishi Pancami, during which women
fast, do puja (worship), and ritually bathe to protect their husbands
health and life and to purify themselves from sins connected with menstruation (see Bennett 1983). What interests us here is not the ritual
complex but the songs that the women compose and perform for the
festival.10
Tij songs are a specialized genre of folksong that extends womens
critical commentary from inner speech and private conversations among
two or three women to a public setting where hundreds of people gather
to observe the women sing and dance. Tij songs portray and comment
upon the shared feelings of women in their sometimes problematic positions as wives, daughters, and daughters-in-law. A dukha (hardship) Tij
song composed and performed by Naudadan girls in 1991 resounds with
a daughters sense of the favored treatment her brothers receive:
Ex
[Daughter:]
I rose in the morning to pick owers,
But did not pick them because they were covered with dew.
Parents just keep the daughters to do work at home,
But not even a small piece of the courtyard is given [to
daughters].
[Parents:]
The small piece of courtyard is needed to dry the paddy,
Go, daughter, to your husbands house to get your property.
[Daughter:]
We have to go empty-handed [to our husbands home],
The brothers fence in their property.
229
Co
py
am
Ex
A second type of Tij songs, political (rajniti) songs, became predominant in Naudada following the peoples movement against the one-party
panchayat system. Rajniti songs thoroughly dominated the Tij festival of
1991. In them girls and women criticized various political parties and
government ofcials, chronicled their abuse and exploitation of women
and the poor, and demanded equal rights for women and the poor. In
1986 Naudadan girls composed the following song verses, which represented a more explicit critical commentary and call for equal rights:
You [parents] compel the daughter to work hard.
How can we abolish this exploitation?
When the daughter is educated, they call her a prostitute.
They believe such matters.
Our society wont allow women to be educated.
230
py
Co
In the 1991 Tij festival one group of singers took on the problem of
alcohol, urging men to stop drinking the local brew (raksi). They took an
active political stance, asserting that only with communism would liquor
cease to ow and women get equal rights and better treatment:
Ex
am
In Tij, womens experiential and personal senses of being female, developed in other contexts, were expressed publicly, cast into a critical,
231
Ex
am
Co
py
cultural form. These songs provided a cultural resource and an alternative perspective on womens lives, an alternative way of understanding
the life path and oneself as female.12 Women who had experienced the
problems associated with being daughters, daughters-in-law, and wives
joined together in Tij to censure those who had created difculties for
them (the mother-in-law, husband, father) and, increasingly, to criticize the social and political system that allowed or brought about these
abuses.
In day-to-day situations Naudadan women were constrained in what
they could say and do. Because of power relations in Naudada, the
groups of women who composed Tij songs were a restricted group, circumscribed to meet within a brief period, once a year. But in the context
of Tij they came together and drew upon their individual experiences to
evoke, through song, strong, shared feelings. As individuals they had
little power to change others ideas, but as a collectivity, even for a brief
time, they could create new songs, develop alternative perspectives, and
express usually outlawed meanings of what it was to be female.
These critical Tij songs, composed and sung as long as the oldest
women could remember, acted as cultural resources to organize more
strident opposition to the patriarchal aspects of society in Nepal and
helped create a potentially resistant group. Rituals can overow their
boundaries (Bakhtin 1984b), and this happened in the Naudadan situation. The events chronicled at the beginning of this chapterthe
womens procession for equal rights and the posse that threatened
local distillers and wife-beaterswere the stuff of Tij songs. The understandings of womens lives developed through the critical commentary
voiced at the Tij festival were being pushed forward into more and more
public venues and were thus gaining signicance for a re-visioning of
selves and a reshaping of gured worlds.13
Naudadan girls participation in the sites and activities we have discussed gave rise to emotionally charged visions of and rehearsed dialogues about themselves as women. These selves were contradictory and
contested, selves that Bakhtin (1981, 1984a) would have called heteroglossic. The girls were developing a nuanced understanding of the
gured world of Hindu womens lives and an emotional attachment to
an identication of themselves in that world. The girls were also developing an embodied personal sense of themselves in their position as
232
Ex
am
Co
py
female, as the victims of frequently unfair treatment. Though left unaccounted for by the public meanings associated with the expected life
path of Hindu women, these personal senses were of concern to the girls.
At the annual Tij festival, women expressed a critical commentary on
their position in the world of domestic relations of Naudada, and, in
1991, after the countrys rst multiparty election for many years, on the
mistreatment of women by the government. These Tij songs, especially
the ones addressed to relatives, echoed girls reactions to the scoldings
they were receiving and the domestic scenes they were witnessing. Unsurprisingly, some of the girls used these songs as a cultural resource to
express their sense of their lives.
This case study from Naudada reveals ways in which women not only
appropriated the identity afforded to them by the gured world but
also formed personal senses and, especially in practices related to the
Tij festival, personal perspectives that contested the expected life path.
Womens selves in this formulation were part of a dialogic process,
emerging in social interactions and sites where different voices coexisted,
and part of dynamic, changing social formations tied to competing interests in the sociohistorical context of their emergence. We will return to
this case in Chapter 12 to examine both the new world of gender relations created in Tij songs and the tentative acting out of that emerging
world by some of the womens groups.
Ex
am
Co
py
Making Worlds
py
Co
am
Ex
Copyright 1998 The President and Fellows of Harvard College
11
Co
py
Ex
am
236
py
set within a larger historical and institutional context, that new gured
worlds and new identitiesboth gured and positionalemerge.
Ex
am
Co
Play occupies a central place in Vygotskys theories; it constitutes ontogenetically the completion within the organism of the capacity for symbolic mediation (Vygotsky 1978, 1987a). All games are jeux desprit. In
play, more than in other human activity, aspects of the natural world, and
by extension, of social worlds that have come to seem natural, are suspended and made subject to pretense. Play is the form of activity that
proceeds in ignorance of any constitutive condition other than a cultural
and conventional design. It draws upon recognized genres of speech and
activity, but it takes the player beyond the immediate setting. Play happens through the world in which it is observably set. Its real setting is
imaginary; it answers only to a gured world. Each generation, however,
comes to play historically and socially; one learns the bounds of play, the
scaffolding, from ones predecessors and fellows and passes them on to
ones successors. It cannot be otherwise for Vygotsky, for it is play that,
by its use of collectively produced artifacts, realizes what is only a species
competence. Each of us learns to inhabit the cultural world through play
when it is instituted within us. The social practices of acting otherwise
become the grounds for our thinking otherwise. The mastery we gain
over our play is mastery over our imagination (see Lachicotte 1992).
Play is also the medium of mastery, indeed of creation, of ourselves as
human actors. Without the capacity to formulate other social scenes in
imagination, there can be little force to a sense of self, little agency. In
play we experiment with the force of our acting otherwise, of our projectivity rather than our objectivity. And through play imagination becomes
embodied, proprioception as much as conception, experienced in activity, moved as much as mapped. Through play our fancied selves become
material.
It is the opening out of thought within the activity of play, what we
might call the cultural production of virtualities, that allows for the
emergence of new gured worlds, of regured worlds that come eventually to reshape selves and lives in all seriousness. Vygotsky and Bakhtin
both attended to this process, but Bakhtin was especially alert to its
place in larger social structures.2 He showed that genres and other forms
237
Ex
am
Co
py
238
Ex
am
Co
py
239
Co
py
durable media, old ones are regured, and new worlds and new identities
are created.
Or it can have such effects. It is the irony of play that its freedom is as
contained as its discipline. Both depend upon the authority and power
which establish the possibility that is also the boundary, the space of
possibilities, that holds play apart from ordinary life. It is no automatic
thing, either the inscription or the dissemination, either discipline or
novelization (as Bakhtin would have it). We must turn once again to the
life of communities, to their institutional and historical coproduction
with the persons who populate them and the cultural forms that express
themto understand both how play worlds are realized and how real
worlds are played out. The media through which new worlds are envisioned have no life of their own, and the people have no own to their
life apart from one another. A particular historical casethe medieval genre and practice called courtly lovewill illustrate the large social
movements that create new gurations of human life. It will show how
a play world may be taken, ultimately and profoundly, into the real
world, to shape the sites of everyday activity.
Courtly Love
Ex
am
240
Ex
am
Co
py
selfthe rst well-known troubadour was Guilhem IX, Duke of Aquitaineor even the lady (Paden 1989). Courtly love was a convivial
pastime, a genre of fanciful conversation and play-acting, or at least of
diversion (Huizinga 1956; Stevens 1973).
Much of the skepticism directed toward courtly love as a social phenomenon with real effect derives from its pretense, its status as a kind of
game (Howard 1966) played by the powerful after their serious work of
oppression had concluded for the day. What difference could such afterhours ephemera make in the materially hard and often brutal life of those
desperate ages? Our answer reveals much about the processes by which
new gured worlds emerge and the kinds of effects their emergence
brings. Cultural historians have traced the slow dissemination and transformation of courtly love (see Rougemont 1956; Smith and Snow 1980),
which amounts to a domestication, from medieval court practice into the
ordinary world of contemporary romance, where it is part of the lives
of, for example, the college women discussed in Chapters 5 and 7. We
live today a gured world of heterosexuality that owes much of its interpretation to the casual spectacles of old courtship.
The scene of courtly love is a familiar one. The principal characters
were two: a lover and his beloved.6 The lovers inhabited their own special world, apart from the social realities that ordinarily dened them. In
some versions this displacement was taken to extremes, as in the cave
where Tristan lived with Iseult, free in their fantastic and solitary absorption with each other. All acts within this exhaustively meaningful world
carried emotional charge. Each lover addressed and focused upon the
other. Predisposition and proaction, the movements of the passions and
the essence of emotion, united them. So much is romantic love, then and
now, the gure of rapture.
To make this supercharged fantasy manifest, obstacles to love were
taken as the very precondition of it. Only by overt movement, the deeds
achieved to overcome impediments, could love be securely signied. The
private world had to become articulate; talk was the necessary service of
adoration. Yet talk was also cheap, indeed speech was seen as the very
bed of falsehood. The false lover and the talebearer, the maledictor, were
the greatest villains in the gured world of courtly love.7 Love had to be
proved in ways that surpassed speech. Hence great travailthe bodys
sacrice and truth, the constant striving of lover to lover, their continuous attractionproved and sanctied the bond. In the play world that
241
Ex
am
Co
py
was courtly love, this rule held: the greater the effort, the more dire the
obstacle, the nearer to surety and revealed truthand the greater the
reward. It was preeminently the part of the beloved, the lady, to set
obstacles of her own, though there would be plenty set by the world
outside, because intimacy with her was the reward given.
Inevitably romantic love was also about prestige. Each lover was the
token of the other. But all this exertion was not entirely other-directed.
From the accomplishments that proved love also accrued the authority
that enforced belief. Each lover remade his or her life in front of the
audience and was valued accordingly, for courage, for sincerity, for that
gift of self which required return, and above all for competence. All
other things being equal, the greater ones prestige, the greater were ones
chances of attaining a tting lover.
But that statement must be qualied. For one thing, love was about
gaining elevation through learning and instruction. The woman employed her desirability toward this goal, that her lover become worthy of
her. Here again is a reason for all those trials of love, dragons slain,
competitors bested. The man did not simply instance an already worthy
character. Rather he acquired that character, spurred by his love, informed by his lovers care and cleverness, and tempered through action.
In that achievement the beloved gained her glory. How much more telling was the skill that created worth than the lesser wisdom that only
recognized it. Thus the beloved, for all her seeming passivity, had the
power in courtly love. She was exalted and served, yet that service was
only the realization of her subtle action and the proof of her love for her
courtier.
Courtly love turned the public world of medieval Occitania outside in,
as does modern romantic love the contemporary world of work. Worth
and power subsisted there in the attractions and the stations of the
private, after-hours court, not in the acts and ofces of the days work.
But what sort of vision was this inverted world? What relation did the
play world of courtly love bear to the political-economic, social, and
cultural forms of life in the Occitans of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, or in the western medieval communities that later became acquainted with the traditions of courtly love? Historical research (Duby
1983, 1994; Jaeger 1985) suggests that the scene fantasized through the
artifacts of courtly lovethe poetry, performances, contests, and ceremonieshad an ambivalent relation to the real worlds of its partici-
242
Ex
am
Co
py
pants. For instance, many writers have remarked that the relation of the
male lover to the female beloved inected and therefore satirized the
relation of servant (courtier) to lord. It has been read both ways, as
elevating the beloved to a kind of potentate and as derogating the lordly
power by giving it feminine form.
The beloved was called domna, literally a feminized form of lord (domnus), a title that signied a kind of political power, a sovereignty over
those pledged to her. This fact has led several scholars (for example,
Jackson 1960) to propose that courtly love was fostered, if not created,
by the powerful women who sometimes ruled lands in the Occitans.
Eleanor of Aquitaine, the granddaughter of Guilhem IX and wife of
Henry Plantagenet, the Angevin king of England, is the prototypical
case: several writers have suggested that her courts at Poitiers were havens for troubadours and home to the entertainments called courts of
love.8 Although there is little evidence that Eleanor actively promoted
courtly lovethere were other powerful, though less grand, domnae
whose sponsorship is better attested (see Paterson 1993). Nonetheless,
most of the supporters of courtly love were men, and it was their wives
(as much as any other actual beloved) who were being addressed in the
poems. What are we to make of their support?
The support of the male nobility was essential, and not simply for the
place and sustenance they gave the poets. Courtly love was a double
profanation, rst of feudal forms of authority and second of the religious
teachings on relations between men and women. Its elevation of women
to higher position, even if in play, made powerful enemies among the
clergy, and therefore needed, all the more, the protection of power.
In the Occitans the cultural elements that shaped the generic forms
of the courtly artsMoorish lyric poetry; erotic Latin poetry along the
model of Ovid; the secular poetry of peripatetic monks, ex-religious
and peri-religious court followers, clerks; and perhaps other elements
as wellwere brought together with social conditions that allowed them
to ourish.9 There existed in the Occitans, rst, a feudalism founded
upon alliance between lords and fee-for-service between lord and retinue, which was less rigid and hierarchical than a vassalage system
founded upon the control of land and labor bound to land; second, a
polity where provincial magnates played off the contending interests of
great dynastskings of France, England, Castile, and Aragon, the German emperorto build their own substantial realms; third, a conten-
243
am
Co
py
Ex
244
Ex
am
Co
py
245
Ex
am
Co
py
Chrtien wrote) became the most famous center of courtly love in the
north.
The north of Europe remade and learned courtliness in the warlike
dress of imperial dreams. Of foreign lands, Italy best absorbed the amusements and manners of courtly love. What is now the west of Italy, along
the Provence/Savoy border, was then the eastern reach of Occitanian
society and culture. The trobar was well known there from the early
twelfth century (Paterson 1993), adopted by a nobility that was to become ever more urban and ever more commercial. In the following centuries the great poets of the Lombard coast and plain, Dante, Petrarch,
and Boccaccio, were sophisticates, and sometimes critics and satirists, of
the art of love. Still, they were its heirs and their works, vehicles of its
devices. It was a woman transplanted from this urbane Italy to the courts
of Paris, Christine de Pizan, who would at the end of the fourteenth
century present a new model of courtly behavior, a modied etiquette for
gender relations, that sought to counter a misuse of courtly love (see
McLeod 1976; Willard 1984).
During its adaptation and dissemination beyond Occitania to the
north, especially in its marriage to chivalry, courtliness took on a decidedly masculine bent. Even in its earliest forms courtly love was produced
largely by men, and it had only one female character of note. But that
character was central, her token (the woman addressed) was near at
hand, and the image of her power differed greatly from the customary lot
of even the noblest women found in other contemporary ideologies (Paterson 1993). However, as the domestic court of the troubadours was
transformed, replaced by the grand courts of kingdom and legend, the
presence of the domna faded. Her customage became less important, and
her station, not her person, became the thing. Epics have small place for
idiosyncrasy. One consequence of courtly love, or rather its transmuted
appropriation, is the woman on the pedestal, the woman whose only
realization lies in the activity of her lover (Kay 1990; Bloch 1991). Another is her opposite, the gure of lechery known from later and cynical
romances. Ironically, this veneration of the abstract belovedwho thus
displaced Jesus or Mary as object of worshipoffended the church as
much as the taste for pleasures of the body (Denomy 1947).
To be sure, the church had opposed courtly love from its inception, for
its vanity and frivolousness, its celebration of worldly merit, and its
parody of male and religious authority. Given the often strained relations
246
Ex
am
Co
py
247
Imagined Communities
Co
py
mance, lyric, epic, and epistolarythe image of love changing somewhat, but always remaining, whatever the tradition or form, the service
of a courtier to win the favor of a lady. The Victorians, aristocracy and
middle classes, were fascinated by it, by the cult of Arthurian chivalry,
by a medievalism in which courtliness was the nostalgic centerpiece.
Today the gures of the troubadours live in high literature and the most
mundane and banal romances, in soap operas and grand opera, in advertisements, and in the talk and dispositions of college students. Courtly
love, albeit in modied form, has been absorbed into the contemporary
gured world of romance. It participates in a lived world far removed
from the noble households of High Medieval Occitania.
Ex
am
248
Ex
am
Co
py
249
Ex
am
Co
py
lace as a nation, an ethnos distinct from (though attached to) the governing apparatus. American mythohistory is also replete with such gures,
heroes and antiheroes, from founding fathers to latter-day personages
gured according to such narrativesSacco and Vanzetti, Rosa Luxemburg, the suspected Communists pursued by McCarthy in the 1950s,
and, as contemporary conservatives might have it, liberals and other
advocates of political correctness in todays politics. All combine to
provide the forms for emulation or rejection, so that an action, such as
voting for a particular candidate or physically attacking immigrants, can
be gured to protect the country from Communist traitors or to make
sensible ones identity as a patriot.12
Calhoun (1991) relates Andersons imagined communities to the general condition of sociality in modern society, to the fact that many relationships we moderns have with one another are indirect, conducted at a
distance by means of generalized media. He also reiterates an important
caution: it is important not to get too enamored of the media as the
tutelary spirits of postmodern societies. The stories and images they
provide are learned, retold, analyzed, and revalued in the contexts of our
everyday communities. There exist embodied traditions of usecommentaries, practical guides, rules of thumb, and outright regulations
that make the effect of the gured worlds of our mass media anything
but automatic or axiomatic. The social practice of the public houses,
salons, clubs, and associations that fostered newspaper literacy cannot
be erased from the story of nationalisms. Calhoun argues, and we concur, that there is also no necessary fascination with these imaginary
worlds, just as there need be no necessary alienation from our embodied
lives as the social power of such imaginaries grows. From the sociological or social psychological vantage, it is a mistake to rely upon some
universalistic, usually psychodynamic, apparatus to explain the impact
of cultural forms on personal life. It is better by far to attend to the social
history of their use and to the specic identities that form in relation to
them.
Nationalism and courtly love, to the extent that they are popularized,
are locally gured worldsimagined or play worlds of a sortthat have
come of age. Their specic visions have been publicized, moved from the
local, highly circumscribed, conditions of their original production to a
broader purview, their audience grown from a coterie to a true public.
(By this standard, it is harder to imagine a more successful gured world
250
py
than courtly love.) Imagined worlds are then potentiary, cultural resources that help us envision new identities that could give shape to the
afliations and disafliations we live by day to day. Like courtly love for
Occitanian courts, looking outward, they can oppose the positions assigned to us by other powers. Or, looking inward, they give content and
form to the positions we seek for ourselves.
Counter-Worlds
Ex
am
Co
The movement from play world to gured world, from a world without
a public to a world with communities, imagined or otherwise, is often
accomplished by the guring of the opposition to this publicization.
Our brief accounts of courtly love and nationalism revealed glimpses of
opposition and barriers to the emergence of these worlds, and of the
development of tools of insult and derogation for threatening or mobilizing action against those who supposedly endanger the course of emergence. Often these villains are imagined as allied with an opposing
gured world. In that counter-world, motives are askew and actions are
opposed to the course of events appropriate to the worlds topos. For
courtly love the counter-world was that of the illiberal court, whose
lord closets the lady and keeps a retinue of maledictors, talebearers,
and opportunists. For the nationalism of the twentieth-century United
States, the counter-world, as construed by conservative talk-show hosts,
is one of secular humanists and multiculturalists whose liberal social
and economic policies dilute and weaken the family and undercut the
country itself. These are portraits given to struggle and mobilization,
scenarios to fear, worlds into whose mismaking all of us will be condemned.
These counter-worlds, though undoubtedly gured as we have used
the term, rarely posit what a lived world should be. Instead they show us
what should not be, what threatens us, and they position the persons
presumed to inhabit them as relationally inferior and perhaps beyond the
pale of any imagined community we would ever want to join. The portrayal of these counter-identities, transgressors of principles and values, often becomes a genre itself, a concatenation of powerful artifacts
left to suggest an awful specter. Typically one gure, say Stalin, or one
transmogried event, the making of the Gulag, becomes a metonym for
251
Codevelopment
Co
py
the entirety. Their rhetorical use is, rst, to censure activities by claiming
they lead to the nightmare world and, second, to motivate an amorphous
support for the activities of the propagandists, which are presented as the
antidote to the actions of those censured.13 Villainy, however, is also in
the eye of the beholder, and so persuasion must be sought elsewhere.
Inuential persons or associations may be recruited to perform or endorse performance of the vision; the gured world will be allied to those
forms of life already known to be popular. And the opposite views will be
linked to despised people or to already established negatives. These tactics are familiar in the material churned out daily in the conduct of
modern politics.
Ex
am
252
Ex
am
Co
py
12
Co
py
Ex
am
The imagined communities discussed in Chapter 11 are often the outcomes of large-scale, spectacular social movements. Anderson (1983)
takes us through the colonial revolutions of South and Central America
on the way to modern nationalism, and surely other historical dramas
could be added to that story. But there also exist quieter means of social
reconstitution, where a public and its habitus take shape together before
the great events happen. E. P. Thompsons great history of the English
working class (1963) showed that seemingly ordinary forms of communal life can produce the grounds for large social upheaval. Another example of the quiet formation of a new public and the realization of an
alternative vision of social and political life is the cultural production of
the Tij festival in rural Nepal.
In 1990 we (Skinner and Holland) went to Naudada, Nepal, for Tij,
an annual festival for women that takes place in late August or early
September.1 We were struck, as Skinner had been in 1986, by the incongruities between the public part of the festival and the rituals that preceded and followed it. The portions of the ritual complex that called for
womens fasting for the health of their husbands or bathing to cleanse
away the pollution of menstruation were in accord with Brahmanical
texts and the patriarchal ideologies and practices that shaped life in large
parts of Nepal. Other portions did not: as noted in Chapter 10, the
womens groups that sang and danced in public on the day of Tij had
composed songs that explicitly criticized male privilege in the family.
In 1991, when we returned to continue our research, our appreciation
of the signicance of Tij grew. The 1991 celebration differed markedly
253
Copyright 1998 The President and Fellows of Harvard College
254
Co
py
from those of 1990 and 1986. The songs of the Tij groups had shifted
from criticism of womens positions in the family to criticism of the
government and its treatment of women. Songs that identied womens
problems in terms of abusive husbands, vulnerability to sharing resources with a co-wife, or parents favoring of sons over daughters had
given way to songs that blamed womens troubles on the former government and on the political party that had recently come to power.2 Increasingly strident verses called for equal rights for women, lower castes,
and the poor.
In addition to an important space of authoring gendered identities
(discussed in Chapter 10), Tij contained, or rather opened up, an imagined space where women envisioned and rehearsed, at least for several
weeks of the year, a gured world that rearranged gender relations.
Through the medium of Tij songs and the collective activity of their
song groups, the Naudadan women brought to life an atmosphere of
possibility. In the play of Tij, womens groups composed and performed
songs through which alternative worlds were imagined and experienced,
through which alternative femininities were given shape.3
Ex
am
255
Ex
am
Co
py
256
Ex
am
Co
py
according to kinship ties, usually glossed by the terms didi (older sister)
and bahini (younger sister). Although friends from other gaons (hamlets,
neighborhoods) sometimes joined in, as well as mothers and in-married
women, the members of a given group were mostly of the same gaon,
related by consanguineal ties, and between ten and twenty-ve years old.
Often they were also members of the same parma, or cooperative labor
exchange group. Women organized and carried out much of the agricultural work in Naudada. They accomplished this work through labor
exchange with a set of more or less permanent partners.5 The groups of
didi/bahini produced songs at the nighttime rehearsals and also in their
parma groups as they worked in the elds.
In the rehearsal sessions there was, in addition to the somewhat carnivalesque atmosphere, an edge of anticipated competition. Tij groups
knew that their songs and dancing would be compared to those of other
groups that performed on the day of Tij. They had a sense of which songs
would be of interest to the audience and which would not. God songs,
for example, were said to be uninteresting.6 Although the upcoming
performance did not overshadow the rehearsal sessions, which were enjoyed in their own right, the anticipation of having their songs and
dancing appreciated lent excitement to the groups preparations.
Another emotional ingredient of the festival was extremely powerful
in shaping the atmosphere of Tij. It came from the return to Naudada of
women who had recently married out. Women from Naudada were usually married to men unknown to them, whose homes took hours or even
days of walking to reach. At Tij the young married women got a respite
from the work and tension in their husbands homes; they were permitted to return to their natal homes.7 Before the roads to Gorkha and
Pokhara were nished and before bridges spanned the larger rivers, trips
home were especially formidable. Then, as well as during the period of
our eldwork, Tij might be the only time the married didi/bahini were
able to make the difcult journey back home.8 And only then were they
able to tell anyone about the situation they faced in their husbands
household. At their maita (natal home) they found some relief from the
constant work and the strains of being a daughter-in-law. Among their
didi/bahini they could nd listeners sympathetic to their ordeals.9 Coming home was a strong emotional event for both the women who returned and their didi/bahini who remained in the gaon.
The returning womens stories often became the inspiration for new
songs. Their news of incidents outside of Naudadafor example, homi-
257
Ex
am
Co
py
258
Ex
am
Co
py
the dancer evoked the meaning of the lyrics. As many as four groups
performed simultaneously.
People of all ages and castes came from the surrounding hamlets to
view the performance. Men encircled the womens groups or stood on
the periphery of the crowd, watching, listening, and sometimes tape-recording the songs. They commented on the beauty of the women and the
quality of the songs. The women of each group hoped that their singing
and dancing would draw the largest crowd, a sign that their lyrics had
been judged the best. The dukha songs were especially moving. Women
both young and old nodded their heads and exclaimed in agreement
with the sentiments expressed by the singer, and sometimes even wept as
the images evoked memories of sad events in their own lives or the lives
of their friends. A woman who became visibly agitated while listening to
one song about a drunken husbands mistreatment of his wife told us
later that her man started churning when she heard the verses. They
brought back vivid memories of her own husband, who would often
come home drunk late at night and beat her.
The TijRishi Pancami complex, we learned, did collectively represent
the feminine ideals gured by the Hindu stories that priests read and
reread to families throughout the year in Naudada. Yet it also did something else in the rehearsal and performance of Tij songs, replete as these
were with womens feelings about their lives and their friendships with
one another. Tij provided, for a brief period each year, a space for the
gathering of the didi/bahini groups and a time for them to reect,
through song, upon their lives as daughters, daughters-in-law, and wives,
and increasingly as political actors. The Tij festival and the month-long
preparation for it provided a space for play; in their production of Tij
songs women could represent themselves as kinds of actors in social
scenes other than those gured by Brahmanical texts and rituals. They
could together think and act otherwise. As we shall see, in envisioning
a novel world of gender relations where women were not the social and
ritual inferiors of men, they were agents in bringing about this world and
agents in reshaping themselves.
259
Ex
am
Co
py
260
Co
py
Ex
am
These lines expressed Renus distress at her husbands and mother-inlaws contempt for her. Her husband was so angry he would not speak to
her, not even to scold; her mother-in-law could not bear to look at her.
She worried that her husband would take away the vermilion powder
(sidur) that women wear in their hair as a symbol of being married. If
he did this, she threatened to go to the river, a very literal reference
to suicide: over the period of Skinners research several Naudadan
women had committed suicide by throwing themselves in rivers swollen
by monsoon rains.
In a song Renu composed the year before, in 1990, she sang of a
drunkard husband who squandered the familys wealth and property on
alcohol. She criticized the inheritance system that keeps property in the
patriline and relegates women to being outsiders in both their husbands house and their maita.
...
Listen to the description of the drunken husband.
Rising in the morning, he goes down to the hotel.
Who will do the household chores?
The hotel girl has probably made the tea.
The raksi has nished all the money.
The household wealth has all gone to the hironi [a cinema
rolehere, the hotel girl].
261
am
Co
py
Ex
262
Ex
am
Co
py
263
Ex
am
Co
py
harmed women and other groups. Although complaints about the lot of
women were similar to those of the earlier dukha songs, the 1991 rajniti
songs were sung against party politicians and members of the ruling
class, not against mothers-in-law, husbands, brothers, and other kin.11
We learned that these rajniti songs were not new. Several people,
mostly men from Gorkha, Chitwan, Lamjung, Pokhara, and Naudada,
told us of composing or of hearing women sing antigovernment songs at
Tij festivals decades before the pro-democracy movement of 1990. These
earlier songs told of corrupt practices, brutality, and exploitation encouraged by those in power during the panchayat period. A few people even
remembered critical songs that might have been sung during the earlier
Rana regime. Our own recordings from 1990 included an antigovernment song, and Skinners collection from 1986 revealed several songs
critical of local politics. It became clear that this kind of song, abundant
in 1991, had been sung, though sparingly, for a long time. After the
political changes it was less dangerous to sing them, and they proliferated in great number.
Although the Tij groups remained the same in 1991, we found a different set of participants stepping forward to lead the composition of rajniti
songs. Kamala, a thirteen-year-old, belonged to the same caste as Renu,
but unlike Renu she attended school. In 1991 she was in the eighth
grade. Kamala strongly identied herself as a student and was clearly
developing, as were many of her school-going friends, a view of herself as
an educated and a politically active person. Like Renu she was recognized as an expert at song composition, but her songs were oriented to a
different eld of action than Renus songs. Kamala composed political Tij
songs that were critical of regional and national politics and that called
for equal rights for women and the poor. The following song, produced
and performed by Kamala and her Tij group, condemns the old political
system for exploiting women and calls for a new political party that will
give women equal rights under the law:
Oh, dominated sisters of Nepal,
We have so much tyranny.
The panchas ate the esh and also the blood,
At last we have the multiparty system.
The thirty-year panchayat reign gave so much trouble to
women,
They drank liquor by selling unmarried girls.
They sold our innocent sisters,
264
am
Co
py
Ex
265
Co
py
am
This rajniti song recognizes Tij as a time when women can sing about
their heartfelt feelings. But instead of focusing on the domestic problems and relationships portrayed in dukha songs, it orients its performers toward national political parties and the international arena of economic development and it takes up the question of womens roles in this
broader world.
In 1993 Kamala told Skinner about a song she and her group had
performed for the 1992 festival. In this song, which Kamala and her
group called Tyranny over Women, women demanded equal access to
education and jobs and a recognition that women are as capable as men
in developing the country:
Ex
266
Co
py
Ex
am
267
Ex
am
Co
py
268
Ex
am
Co
py
and new dispositions and new sensibilities could be formed. These novelties were not so much the results of free play as the outcomes of
situated cultural production. It is not only womens increasing participation in education but also an emergent form of song production, in
which Tij songs are written down (often by individual authors) for rehearsals and for publication, that has opened up the space of Tij to the
world of the educated and vice versamaking possible the revolution of
rajniti songs.
The years and years of Tij songs have been important at both the
individual and collective levels. During some period in the past, perhaps from their inception, Tij songs became a medium for describing
womens worlds and the position of women in those worlds. At some
point womens Tij groups began to articulate a critical commentary on
the world of domestic relations and, much less frequently until the peoples movement, on the world of the state. Although Tij was timeboundthe practice sessions constrained to a few weeks, the public
performance lasting only one daythe festivals provided a space for
women to objectify, and thus the possibility to disinhabit, the familiar
domestic world and, if only for a brief time, inhabit a new one. To
relegate Tij to the category of rituals of rebellion or rituals of reversal, in which people are portrayed as stepping outside the boundaries of
everyday life then returning unchanged with the boundaries reafrmed,
is to miss the power of play-worlds like Tij to transform selves and
boundaries. After Tij, though women returned to the domestic world,
they re-created, by rehearsing the Tij songs to themselves, the altered
subjectivities and the sense of the unnaturalness of the social and political relations that kept them unequal to men.
Over the period of our research this time-bounded world began to
expand. Tij groups became less circumscribed in time, their compositions less controllable. Their songs became available both in handwritten
versions and in published songbooks, outside the time and locale of the
festival (earlier, singing Tij songs after the festival had been labeled a
sin). The relations between women in many Tij groups also became more
multi-stranded: some of the women began to relate to one another not
just as sisters and friends but also as political actors and, in one case, as a
literacy teacher promoting equal rights. Women in these groups also
expanded the scope of their agency in the worlds of domestic relations
and political action. For instance, the women who participated in the
269
Ex
am
Co
py
march and the posse described in Chapter 10 cast their demands and
sought redress in ways novel to both the world of political action and the
world of domestic relations. The inuence of these Tij groups has grown
apace, extended beyond Tij Day by songbooks that have carried their
songs to other arenas of activity and broader expanses of time.
In the space of the Tij festival, women were authoring new worlds
and, in turn, new selves. Different constructions of being female were
evolving along with novel imagined worlds. As they appropriated political song texts as tools of self-identication, Kamala and the other women
producing these songs were developing ways of conceptualizing themselves as politically aware actors and activists in a political world.
Through the medium of the festival, alternative worlds, identities, cultural forms, and senses of agency were codeveloping. This was a path
toward a new world of gender relations and gendered identities in
Naudada.
13
Co
py
Identity in Practice
Ex
am
Identity in Practice
271
Ex
am
Co
py
nous literature on identity; instead of arriving at our point about identity after another lengthy critique of extant versions, we provide an alternative formulation, one grounded in practice and activity theories, to be
sure, but also in our own eldwork. Our focus is on what we call, in
homage to Bakhtin, the space of authoring, and it directs our effort to
understand identity in practice.
Practiced identities are constructs that can be described by reference
to several contexts of activity. The rst context of identity is the gured
world. The notions of cultural, intentional, virtual, or imaginary
worlds are quite common across the disciplines of contemporary social
science. They are the frames of meaning in which interpretations of
human actions are negotiated. What we add is the peculiarly practical
notion that such worlds are also socially identied. Their gures are
not gures of speech or expression as these are ordinarily conceived: as
disembodied conveyances, or neutral media, of interchange. Rather the
parts of gured worlds are gures in Bakhtins sense; they carry disposition, social identication, and even personication just as surely as
they carry meaning. Thinking, speaking, gesturing, cultural exchange
are forms of social as well as cultural work. When we do these things we
not only send messages (to ourselves and others) but also place ourselves in social elds, in degrees of relation toafliation with, opposition to, and distance fromidentiable others.
The second context of identity, then, is positionality. It is less a separate
second context than a (separable) counterpart of guration. Positionality has to do with more than division, the hereness and thereness of
people; it is inextricably linked to power, status, and rank. Social position has to do with entitlement to social and material resources and so to
the higher deference, respect, and legitimacy accorded to those genders,
races, ethnic groups, castes, and sexualities privileged by society. It is
the context of identity that was most developed by constructivism. But
the activity of positioning refers back to the cultural lay of the land, to
gured worlds, and not only to some species-given universal frame. It is
true that people never inhabit only one gured world. It is true that
the more durable social positionssuch as gender, race, ethnicity, and
classhave probably been cultivated in almost every frame of activity.
Positions marked by these enduring divisions, and their expectations of
privilege (or not), are features of the worlds we describe, whether that of
272
Ex
am
Co
py
Identity in Practice
273
py
cultural media, the means of expression, that are their legacy. The course
of publicization is markedly complicated (as suggested by the spectacularization of courtly love, and by the new divisions of women signaled by rajniti songs), but this concretion of a novel gured world
brings us back to the rst of the four contexts.
Climbing Houses
Ex
am
Co
274
Ex
am
Co
py
Identity in Practice
275
Ex
am
Co
py
associations that she might not have been able to verbalize. Her body
carried a sense of caste, and of her caste position in respect to others
about her, wherever she went. At the same time, she both knew and
could generate gurings of caste and possessed an embodied sense of
how caste was practiced in Naudada. She could probably tell herself (and
others) about herself as a person of a particular caste, as well as consciously monitor and edit her own behavior to t an image of proper
caste behavior. She was, in sum, highly susceptible to guring herself
and being gured by others according to caste, and to positioning herself
and being positioned as a lower-caste personone prohibited from entering the kitchens of higher-caste persons. She lived in a web of constraints organized around caste and was probably propelled at times by
purely ideological constructions; at other times by an almost purely tactical social reckoning of what it would cost her to refuse the caste
position afforded her in a given situation; and, probably a majority of the
time, by a mixture of the two.
Both a culturalist view, which credits an asocial emphasis on cultural
logics, and a constructivist view, which emphasizes the calculus of social
position by actors, make too little of the kind of agency we have seen
throughout the cases described in this book. This is our major disagreement with both frames of interpretation. For us, the incident of the
woman who climbed up the house became an invitation to consider not
only the means by which her behavior was collectively orchestrated but
also the ways in which creativity is collectively enabled. Even hemmed in
by caste constraints, Gyanumaya managed, in a strikingly inventive way,
to circumvent the obstacles to her participation in the interviewing. She
improvised from the resources at hand a rather spectacular entry to the
house. By focusing only on the social constraints, we would have missed
the signicance of her improvised departure from a routine path. By
ignoring the constraints, we would have missed the forces that made the
path obligatory and the pointedness of her deviation.
Or take the case of Roger (Chapter 9). Foucault has presented a compelling picture of scientic discourse, its contribution to a constructed
behavioral normality, and the specically modern impetus to discipline
those who deviate from this norm. Roger was one such person, who had
come under the purview of the medical establishment and was subjected
to its categorization of mental disorders and to the treatments prescribed
to manage these disorders. But Roger twisted the categories applied to
276
Ex
am
Co
py
his case. He used what his caregivers told him and popular texts about
mental disorders as ways to gure an identity or rather identities, as ways
to interpret and organize his actions in the social contexts important to
him. He was having difculties with both his parents and his wife; the
histories of negotiations around his problems with them had created
dilemmas that troubled him. Roger appropriated different diagnoses of
his mental problems to create distinctive standpoints within these two
dilemmas. With his parents, he elaborated an identity organized around
manic-depression; with his wife, an identity around borderline personality disorder. Roger assimilated the textual artifacts and categories of psychiatry to an everyday part of his life, improvising several new identities through which he would craft new answers to his dilemmas and
(concomitantly) new positions for his parents and his wife. He used
these resources opportunistically, as a Lvi-Straussian bricoleur would,
yet without regulation by an overarching cultural logic or an institutionally prescribed blueprint.
A more collaborative improvisation, and one of clear importance, was
evident in the Tij festival in Naudada, Nepal (Chapter 12). A particular
sort of Tij song, rajniti or political songs, predominated in the festival of
1991, virtually supplanting the dukha or suffering songs that had predominated in earlier festivals. Rajniti songs were responsive to the Peoples Movement of 1990 and the resulting change from the kings oneparty system to a multiparty system. They were quite different in content
from the dukha songs: instead of being about womens mistreatment by
husbands and mothers-in-law, the songs of 1991 were more often about
the atrocities of the former government and the ill-treatment of women
and poor people by political parties. In one regard, however, rajniti songs
were rather simple improvisations on a third, less frequent type of song.
These ghatana or event songs typically described newsworthy incidentssuicides, landslides, plane and bus accidents. Formally, rajniti
songs were mere variations, a type of ghatana song that took political
events and incidents as its subject matter. The improvisation allowed
women to redirect their critical commentary from the domestic hearth
and eld to the arena of government and party politics.
Identity in Practice
277
Ex
am
Co
py
278
Ex
am
Co
py
Identity in Practice
279
Ex
am
Co
py
280
Ex
am
Co
py
often appears both socially naive and simplistic. Vygotsky neglected the
social forms and constraints to which the others attend so carefully. He
was nearly silent on the kinds of human domination that they reveal. He
focused instead on a fantastic, seemingly utopian and liberatory power
granted by symbols and the human ability to play with symbols: the
power to create worlds, effective contexts of action, that may never exist
apart from the pivot of imagination. Yet it is Vygotskys focus that enables
us to link Bourdieus space of practice with Bakhtins space of authoring
and so helps us envision this second kind of agency.
Human life is inexplicable without our abilities to gure worlds, play
at them, act them out, and then make them socially, culturally, and thus
materially consequential. This collective ability to take imaginary worlds
seriouslythe sort of fetishization that makes certain pieces of paper
over into moneyis the magic that anthropologists as well as others
have tried to capture in the concept of culture. Vygotsky was fascinated
by the human ability to escape the immediate control of environmental
stimuli and instead organize behaviors, thoughts, and feelings in relation
to imagined stimuli. Children early in their lives exhibit the ability and
the desire to enter into worlds that they imagine, to treat objects around
them as (regured) objects from those worlds, and to put aside, at least
temporarily, feelings, interests, and concerns that are irrelevant to the
play world. The play worlds that children create are akin to the more
complex culturally constructed or gured worlds that they enter into as
they grow older.
Human play, Vygotsky emphasized, develops the childs capacity for
semiotic mediation and makes it a part of the childs intimate world.
Through play people acquire the key cultural means by which they
escape, or at least reduce, the buffeting of whatever stimuli they encounter as they go through their days. Vygotsky stressed that only part of the
signicance of language, signs, and symbols was caught by their representational potential or their capacity for stating rules. Like Austin, he
believed that people do things with words, and that representation is
only one action, albeit an important one, that words make possible.
People use symbols: to organize and manage their own and others behavior, to intervene in what Bakhtin would call the worlds addressivity, to objectify, or concretize even in their literal absence, other contexts of activity. This is the reason we nd it important to think about
how cultural resources are used; for example, how the life narratives
Identity in Practice
281
am
Co
py
Ex
282
Ex
am
Co
py
Identity in Practice
283
Ex
am
Co
py
284
Ex
am
Co
py
trials over the authority to be given to women who try to wield this new
weapon and, thus by Bakhtins rule, even to the discourse itself.
The critical discourses of Tij songs (see Chapters 10 and 12) provide
another example of an identity politics that is both public and intimate
(see Holland and Skinner, 1995a). Several of the songbooks published
by various Communist parties around the time of the Tij festival of 1991
included forewords that invited readers to gure the world according
to a Marxian analysis of gender relations espoused by the sponsoring
parties. They did so in a manner that was not necessarily politic. They
branded the analyses of gender relations given in the older dukha songs
as correctly critical but as failing to understand the true source of
womens oppression in class dynamics. The rajniti songs published in the
books were designed to remedy that failed critique. The domestic world
gured in dukha songs and the village women marked by that world
were devalued, and a new division between them and their younger,
more educated, and more politically active sisters was opened up.
Because Tij songs are such important resources of inner speaking, this
division was felt and rehearsed personally and reproduced (in some parts
of Nepal, though not in Naudada) in interpersonal relations among the
group members. The feminist wings of the parties have grown sensitive
to these ill effects, and now seek to disseminate songs that unite the
communities that practice rajniti and dukha singing. These politics of
identication concerning (types of) people, the cultural resources they
produce, and the acts that are taken to signify particular identities characterize the social space of authoring. They provide generic and personied models, the voices that are re-created in inner speech, for the
complex interchange that makes up particular identities.
The social and political work of identication, in brief, reveals two
closely interrelated lessons. First, identities and the acts attributed to
them are always forming and re-forming in relation to historically specic contexts. They come to bear the marks of these contexts and their
politics. Identities and their cultural resources, their semiotic tools in
Vygotskys terms, are constantly being generated, sometimes censored or
suppressed. But they are responses to, develop in, and so include the
dilemmas set by the struggles, personal crises, and social recruitment
under which they form. The salience and authority of Rogers psychiatric identities grew as he regured a place for himself in the web of
familial and institutional relations disrupted by his mental disorder. Tij
Identity in Practice
285
Ex
am
Co
py
286
py
ings and the identities afforded by them may simply not be taken up, as
Andrew refused to learn the world according to Alcoholics Anonymous
and to gure himself in the shapes of its narratives. Worlds and identities
can be eetinga moments playor they can eventually become as central to personal and public life as the (once courtly) world of romance.
Ex
am
Co
If persons and gured worlds are in the making over months, years,
decades, even centuries, then so must be the groups with which people
afliate. Critics of the concepts of culture successfully argued, during the
period we call the critical disruption (see Chapter 2), that social positions cannot be disregarded in any cultural guring of the world of
human action. Accounts that conceived cultures as shared webs of meaning, in which all are equally suspended regardless of such structured
social divisions as gender, class, and race, were called into serious question. This recognition of the importance of social position in shaping
peoples experience led to experiments in ethnography. This trend was
marked, for example, in gender studies descriptions of womens cultures
and socialities, of gendered worlds; in British cultural studies emphasis on subcultures, whether based on gender, race, class, or generation;
and in Bourdieus even more ambitious concepts of class (and potentially
other forms of) habitus.
Yet, as proponents of these approaches have noted, perspectives predicating clearly differentiable arrays of social forces, even those privileging
class dynamics as a denitive social and cultural divider, have proven too
limiting. Social positions cut and cut again across one another. Womens
experience in the social life of the United States is not only different for,
say, black women and white women; each of these groups is further
divided by class differences, by differences of sexual orientation, by ethnicities, by the gamut of social dividers that have become common in
postmodern sociologies.
Our use of identitiesinformed by these two dependent, but noncoincident processes, guring and positionalityleads to another way of
conceptualizing personhood, culture, and their distributions over social
groups. Figured worlds and their situated realizations, rendered collectively and personally as spaces of authoring, are socially animated by
groupings that may not be reied as social groups. The politics of partici-
Identity in Practice
287
Ex
am
Co
py
py
Co
am
Ex
Copyright 1998 The President and Fellows of Harvard College
py
Notes
Ex
am
Co
1. All persons names and many place names are pseudonyms to preserve
the anonymity of those who helped us in our research.
2. McCall and Simmons (1978) represent an important Meadean vein that
inspired us originally. That literature now includes an expanded and
elaborated vision of the social and cultural bases for possible identities.
Besides social roles, cross-cutting master statuses of race, ethnicity,
class, gender, and sexuality are important bases (McCall 1987; Stryker
1987), as are salient cultural conceptions of personality (e.g., an aggressive person).
3. In the United States, at least, the center of gravity of cultural studies is
currently in the humanities. This book is part of an effort to extend
cultural studies through more sociological and ethnographic work.
4. This tradition was centered at Marburg (see Holquist 1990). Bakhtins
early works (1990, 1993) developed a phenomenological aesthetics (or
better, perhaps, an aesthetic phenomenology) through a technical, philosophical language and argument more or less faithful to the Marburg
position (see Chapter 9).
5. Self and identity are loaded terms. In Chapter 2 we place our use of
them in the context of the literature. For the present, let us borrow Harrs
(1984) notion of the self as the (theoretical or presumptive) collocation of
a personal repertory. The self is the place from which persons view or
sense the world and reect upon it. There is no presumption that a person
has only one important sense of self; or an impetus to consistency across
these different senses of self. We are not concerned here with the psychodynamic dilemmas that occupied Erikson but rather with the selves
that are assembled from, and in relation to, cultural resources.
6. This book is a collective product, including the analyses of the experiences we describe, but from time to time we speak from the perspective of
one person.
7. The incident happened in 1986. Note that, although Holland had already
289
Copyright 1998 The President and Fellows of Harvard College
290
10.
11.
12.
Ex
13.
am
9.
Co
py
8.
4.
Ex
5.
am
Co
3.
White (1992), Harris (1989), and Fogelson (1979) review the anthropological uses of self, identity, person, and individual.
Nepal is home to many groups, whose history and social position vary
widely. Their cultural practices, including self-related discourses, also
vary. Skinners and Hollands research was carried out in a different area of
Nepal with people who, for the most part, were not Newar.
Concepts that might be translated as self in South Asia, including Nepal, are complex. A Sanskrit term, atma or atman, is sometimes translated
as self or soul. This term, deriving from Hindu religious and philosophical texts and discourses, is sometimes used by nonspecialists to
speak of an aspect of themselves that continued on in a cycle of death and
rebirth. In Naudada, where Skinner and Holland did their research among
mixed-caste Nepali speakers, people made more use of concepts having to
do with what we will later dene as self-in-practice. Skinner (1990: 21)
writes: There is no noun I heard used to indicate this notion of an
empirical self [self-in-action], but there are pronouns (e.g., aphu, which is
used as a reexive pronoun to refer to ones own self, mero or my, ma or
I), that an individual would use to refer to herself as an actor in the world
and to reect on her actions. Man was also an important concept in
Naudada (see Chapter 12); it is often glossed as heart/mind. The man is
where thoughts and feelings are stored and churn about. It is located in
the center of the chest. McHugh reported that Gurungs, an ethnic group
living primarily in another region of the country, used the term sae to
mean the seat of will, memory, and emotion . . . conceived as a kind of
entity located in the chest (1989: 82). She found the concept to be an
important one that individuals use to articulate their own will, thoughts,
and emotions.
For reviews see Harris (1989); Marsella, DeVos, and Hsu (1985); Levine
(1982); Shweder and Bourne (1984); White (1992).
The slight differences between the culturalist position we describe here
and that set out in Chapter 1 are artifacts of the opposition of culturalists
to constructivists, rather than to universalists. In Chapter 1 we assumed
the effects of the critical disruption that gave birth to constructivism.
A proposition that psychologists such as Markus and Kitayama (1991),
Kitayama, Markus, and Lieberman (1994), and Miller (1988) have set out
to test through quasi-experimental designs.
This was why Hallowell argued that self was a better focus for cross-cultural research than ego or personality: The term self . . . seem[s] to
connote a concept that remains closer to the phenomenological facts that
reect mans self-awareness as a generic psychological attribute. It retains
the reexive connotation that is indicated when we say that a human
py
2.
6.
7.
291
10.
11.
Ex
12.
py
9.
Co
8.
am
292
13.
Ex
16.
am
15.
Co
py
14.
293
17.
19.
20.
21.
22.
py
Ex
23.
Co
18.
am
294
26.
27.
py
Ex
28.
Co
25.
am
24.
29.
295
296
am
Co
py
3. Figured Worlds
Ex
1. The anthropological examples are vast: every ethnography tries to capture at least one signicant gured world. Two fascinating examples are
Luhrmanns work with witches in contemporary Great Britain (1989)
and Lancasters account of machismo and male sexualities in Nicaragua
(1992).
2. Vygotsky and the sociohistorical school made much of the childs dependence upon social interaction as both the source of cultural symbols for
imagination and the initial support for enacting the symbols.
3. An important pivot into gured worlds is through discourses. In any
conversation or text a great deal of taken-for-granted information is omitted. This talk, the particular material and social conditions in which it is
297
5.
Ex
6.
am
4.
Co
py
being used (Holland and Cole 1995), and the more generalized notion of
discourse are made more determinant in relation to an underlying cultural model (Quinn and Holland 1987). Cultural model directs attention to the ways in which individuals come to know and sense gured
worlds. Dened cognitively, cultural models consist of schemas (mental/emotional knowledge structures) that guide attention to, draw inferences about, and evaluate experience. They also provide a framework
for organizing and reconstructing memories of experience (DAndrade
1995). The types of cultural models most closely related to gured worlds
are what Leavitt (1996) calls prototypical social situations or scenarios.
Lutz (1988) and Lutz and Abu-Lughod (1990) argue that emotions have
meaning in relation to such simplied social scenes, imagined courses
of social interaction, or what Quinn and Holland (1987) and Holland and
Kipnis (1994) call prototypical event sequences. We believe that types of
people are identied and have meaning in relation to gured worlds.
DAndrade (1981) calls this kind of abstraction, through which persons
form (generalized) cultural knowledges, guided discovery, and contrasts its slow and natural course with the articial means of specialized and highly regulated knowledges. The latter are particularly dependent upon verbal commentary and formal instruction. Vygotskys zone of
proximal development casts a different light upon this distinction, since
it takes the heart of instruction, the verbal commentary of elders, right
into everyday discovery in the form of inner speech.
Harr and others have used the concept of storylines in a way that is
relevant to gured worlds. Storylines seem to be the taken-for-granted
unfolding of particular activities such as instruction. There are many
storylines associated with gured worlds. One might consider what we
have called the central narratives in the world of romance and the world
of domestic relations in Nepal storylines that are especially important.
These arrests recall what Bakhtin (1981) called centripetal social
forces: those forms of (meta)practice (e.g., translinguistics) which asserted the presumptive unity of language, in the face of an always overwhelming diversity of speaking practices. The point, for Bakhtin as for
Crapanzano, is the dialogicality of social activity, the mutual interplay of
specic instance and generic means, neither of which exists apart from
the other.
This is not an unusual occurrence in anthropological research. Holland,
in studying Shango in Trinidad, traveled around the island to many different feasts and celebrations, learning from participants about the African
powers that manifested at the feasts. In the world of Shango, gaining
knowledge of this sort was a meaningful act. To become expert in Shango
it was necessary to enter into a reciprocal relationship with the powers.
7.
10.
Ex
11.
py
9.
Co
8.
am
298
12.
13.
299
Ex
am
Co
py
21.
22.
py
Ex
23.
Co
20.
am
300
24.
301
Co
py
Ex
am
1. The names of the universities and all personal names are pseudonyms.
Some potentially identifying details in the quotes have been changed.
Although we sometimes use the term American, the sample is small and
from the Southeast. There were differences between the black and white
womens interpretations of romantic relationships, but they are not relevant here (see Holland and Eisenhart 1990).
2. See Chapter 3 on the concept of cultural model and its relation to the
notion of a gured world. Here, as in Chapter 4, we sometimes use cultural model in the more specic sense of the taken-for-granted standard
social scenarios that form backdrops of meaning for a gured world.
3. Because few men were interviewed in the earlier study at SU, we describe the model as one held by women. Women at Bradford used similar
sorts of terms and seemed to rely upon similar ideas about attractiveness
and the respective roles of men and women, but were more likely to
emphasize self-determination and self-protection in their interpretation
of male/female relationships (see Holland and Eisenhart 1990). We did
not happen to have any women in our study who identied themselves as
lesbian. Later studies of the world of romance for gay and lesbian couples
on one of the campuses suggest both similarities with and differences
from the one we describe (Reidel, personal communication).
302
Ex
am
Co
py
4. Both Della and Karla were embarrassed and offended by being cast into
the world of gender relations in what they considered to be inappropriate
situations by men they considered inappropriate partners. While most of
the interpretations of them as potential romantic/sexual partners were not
taken amiss, these were. The women were learning of their vulnerability
to romantic/sexual typing regardless of their wishes to be so typed (see
Holland and Eisenhart 1990).
5. Markus and Nurius (1987) argue that individuals form personalized images of themselves in various situationse.g., visions of themselves receiving a Nobel Prize. These visions motivate actions that seek to realize
these possible selves. There also is evidence that some images of possible
selves are negatively evaluated, so that one works to avoid their realization.
6. As mentioned earlier, the African-American women at Bradford were concerned about maintaining self-determination and control. Since knowledge about ones behavior and feelings can be used by others to manipulate one, having a steady boyfriendas opposed to going out with a
number of boyfriendsbecomes a way to control information.
7. Susans implied commentary, carried partly through her sarcastic tone,
calls to mind the space of authoring selves (see Chapter 8).
8. Susans process of learning is a good example of the appropriation and
personalization of social discourse (see Chapter 8).
9. This notion of fossilization as habituation is also pertinent to Bourdieus
conception of the habitus, and of the processes of embodiment that
ground learning in the habitus. It suggests, for instance, that nonverbal
(proprioceptive) forms of practice interact with verbally mediated practice in the reproduction of the habitus more intimately, and perhaps more
convertibly, than Bourdieu seems to think.
10. In other words, expertise is far more than cognition. It involves emotions
that are, in Rosaldos (1984: 143) words, embodied thoughts, thoughts
seeped with the apprehension that I am involved.
6. Positional Identities
5.
6.
7.
py
Ex
8.
Co
4.
peoples relative power to position themselves and others. Their conversational dominance and conversational charisma relate to our notion
of positionality.
Brown (1980) comes to a similar conclusion about Tenejapa Maya
women. Women tend to use linguistic patterns of negative politeness (as
Brown calls strategies such as indirection, formality, and deference) more
frequently than men in many different situations. Brown concludes that
women, because of their position of lesser privilege than men, often take
special care not to cause offense. Their sense of their social position is
evidently important across several gured worlds.
Skinner learned that, in the schools of Naudada, students who thought of
themselves as progressive indicated their rejection of the hierarchy of
castes by accepting food and water from one another regardless of caste.
Others who picture social and cultural life as organized around semi-independent spheres include, besides Bourdieu (1993), Connell (1987),
whose idea of gender regimes combines development in local institutions and settings, themselves intricately related, with their ties to state
interventions, to make up a gender order.
Fordham primarily emphasizes race and gender. She does say that race
undercuts class in African-American communities, so that two dissimilar class structures, Euro- and African-American, are created.
Gregor tells of a woman who taunted the men back; she became the target
of a rumor that she had entered the mens house. Although the men,
individually, were reluctant to carry out the threat of gang rape, they
persuaded one another that the act was necessary and carried it out.
Lave and Wenger (1991) argue that social position species knowledge in
what they call communities of practice. Knowledge differs for the different positions of such communities and must, in a sense, be reconstructed
when one moves from one position to another. For instance, knowledge
of an academic topic must be recongured when one moves from student
to teacher, because the social claims that one makes in the expression of
knowledge cannot be extricated from its content to create any invariant
form of meaning.
Knowledge display is not the only skill with signing import that is learned
in exclusive activities. Brenneis (1990) makes the point that emotional
experiences are also collectively developed in certain activities. Those
who are barred from these activities are unlikely to develop the emotional
experiences to the same degree of facility as those who fully participate. If
expressing a certain emotion competently is treated as a claim to a certain
positional identity, then one is unlikely to be able to claim that identity if
one has been barred from the formative activity.
The situation is more complex and uid than we have indicated. The
am
3.
9.
10.
303
12.
13.
py
Ex
14.
Co
11.
am
304
15.
305
am
Co
py
in the eastern area of the state. Though he feels superior to the black
slaves who work the plantations of the region, he nds outin a scene
that epitomizes for him the relations of power dening (and conning)
his place in the Antebellum Souththat he, a poor white, is not regarded
as very different from them. He goes to the big house of the plantation
for which his father works, to deliver a message to the owner. The black
butler who responds to his knock denies the positional claim he has
innocently made by going to the front door and sends him, in a condescending manner, to the back. From this revelatory experience, a moment
of recognition like Kondos glimpse in the butchers case, Sutpen determines a lifelong course of action that he follows with singleness of purpose (to tragedy).
16. This mutually constitutive relationship between the semiotic mediator
and the target of the mediation can also be more complex. Kulick (1993)
describes a highland Papuan man who used a genre usually associated
with women to mediate, in fact to accentuate, an understanding of his
message.
17. In effect, this statement repeats in more personal terms Bakhtins point
about the social valuation of language-images, voices, and other media
of guration (see Chapter 8). It is not simply that peoples activity is
motivated and shaped by the social valuation of the forms of its expression. It is equally that the real activity of people changes the forms valuation. There is no abstract process of reproduction, like a psychologized
notion of generalizability, which removes the form from its social context of use. There are only real iterations in specic instances.
Ex
306
Ex
am
Co
py
307
8. Authoring Selves
Co
py
14. Alarm and retaliation over sexual harassment charges belie this point.
See Richard Bernsteins (1994) Guilty If Charged in the New York Review of Books. Bernstein is not reviewing a book, but rather ridiculing
sexual harassment charges and their prosecution at the University of New
Hampshire (see Chapter 13).
15. Michael Lynch (1991) makes a similar point regarding laboratories and
the spaces where science is done. Space, in the way he uses it, is not
simply a neutral place on some ideal geophysical (or even psychological)
grid. Rather space is haunted by the activities that take place in it, and
hence by the dispositions and emotional tones of their performers.
16. These processes of commodication are surely implicated in the degree
to which attractiveness is thought of as an essential characteristic of a
person.
Ex
am
10.
py
Ex
11.
Co
9.
am
308
12.
avant-garde. Their visions become templates for possible futures; their art
provides texts of possibilities. We shall take up this world-forming aspect
of cultural expression in Chapters 11 and 12.
In Vygotskys account inner speech becomes differentiated from social
speech somewhere in the rst decade of the lives of most of us. The
person is not simply a robot of the collective in either Vygotskys or
Bakhtins view. In the Vygotskian view even the total neophyte, the infant and subsequent child, is active. Valsiner (1993) describes the crossgenerational transit of cultural forms not as a cultural transmission, which makes the child simply the recipient of the lifeways of the
parental generation, but rather as a bi-directional exchange, where the
child is likely to produce behavior outside the cultural repertoire of
the parent.
Voloshinov posits two extremes, or ideal types, of experience, which conform to the poles of expression (socioeconomy/organism). One, entirely
shaped by common parlance and social speech and thus perfectly ideological, he called we experiences. The second, I experiences, approaches the organismic, and is virtually unarticulated. I experiences,
because they cannot be put into words, are chaotic, unorganized.
Reference to this stabilized audience sets Bakhtin apart from many of the
social constructivists, such as Harr, who give no bases for peoples durability despite multiple resistance to discursive positionings.
Here he species that we are always communicating in inner speech with
an addresseeif no particular person, then we assume as our addressee a
contemporary of our literature, our science, our moral and legal codes
(1986: 86).
It can be argued, however, that Bakhtins notion of monological or
authoritative discourse implicitly requires a stable, even juridical or ritual, audience. This assertion would be partly the converse of Bakhtins
argument (1981) that heteroglossia arises and ramies through the social
division of labor.
Stability of social relations and material conditions is a necessary condition of the stability of the authorial stance.
Languages are not just verbal or scriptural. We have already discussed
other means of communicating social relations, including spatial congurations, positions and decorations of the body, silence and nonsilence.
Communication via these means need not coincide with the communication that proceeds linguistically, via choice of social language and dialect.
Indeed, the force of social stratication, of social hierarchy, is often objectied in the disjunction across differing media of expression. Dialogues
happen via these metacommunicative means as well, in ways that are
important to the development of identity.
15.
16.
17.
Ex
18.
am
14.
Co
py
13.
309
19.
310
Ex
am
Co
py
1. Fieldwork for the study was done from 1986 to 1991 by a research team at
the University of North Carolina School of Medicine headed by Sue E.
Estroff. I in the account is Lachicotte; we in this section includes not
only his coauthors but also his colleagues on the research team.
2. See, e.g., Siegler and Osmond (1974) on medicalization in psychiatry;
Millon and Klerman (1986) on classication of psychopathology in the
DSM; Grob (1973, 1983, 1991) for the classic histories of American mental health care; Stone (1986) on differences in European traditions; Szasz
(1961, 1970) on the antipsychiatry movement.
3. The discussion adheres more to the language of the third edition, the one
in use at the time of our study. The fourth edition, for instance, substitutes
the term mood disorders for what we call affective disorders. The fact that
psychiatry has its own manual says something about its peculiar history.
All other medical specialties use the International Classication of Diseases, now in its tenth edition.
4. Two recent and excellent monographs examine the social and cultural
constructions of traumatic disorders: Hackings study (1995) of multiple
personality and Youngs work (1996) on post-traumatic stress disorder.
5. The nature of the personality disorders is perhaps the most debated topic
of modern American medical psychiatry. See Millon (1981, 1985, 1990)
for a comprehensive treatment. Nuckolls (1992a, 1992b) draws upon
Millon in his own work on personality disorders.
6. It is unrealistic to call this confusion a kind of error, if by that we make
the diagnosis the basic gure. The personae precede, in most cases, the
formal diagnosis. It might be more appropriately called the medicalization of a psychological discourse. This cultural world is replete with discourses related in various degrees of sub- and superordination. Though
medical psychiatry, ordained by the DSM-III and now IV, is hegemonic, it
has itself a compilation of earlier and contemporary discourses, not all of
which are well subsumed or even regulated (see Lachicotte 1992).
7. Schizoaffective disorder is a form of schizophrenia whose dominant
symptomatic expression features mood disturbancesdepression or mania or both. Schizoaffective disorder, like borderline personality, is a specic kind of intermediate or liminal category of the nosology.
8. The notion of role constriction comes from Kai Erikson (1957, 1962) and
from the medical sociological tradition founded in role theory (Parsons
1951, 1972). The classic account of the social formation of mental patients is Goffman (1961). Labeling theory (Scheff 1966) was another
limited but inuential view of the social foundations of mental disorder;
for criticism of it see Townsend (1976); Gove (1970, 1980).
311
Co
py
9. For generalization of Selyes work see, e.g., Coelho, Hamburg, and Adams
(1974); Monat and Lazarus (1977). According to Marsh (1992) this generalization entailed changing Selyes pathogenic model of stress to a transactional model. The latter describes the interrelations of organism and
environment dynamically, so that the stress present in the local ecosystem
is a function less of the nature of the components (such as a pathogen)
than of their interactions. It is analogous to the change from pathogenic
to ecoimmunological theories of disease. Hateld (1987) calls this basic
perspective a stress-diathesis model.
10. Cain (1995) studied patients undergoing treatment in mental health facilities in Costa Rica, where neither psychiatry nor alternative treatments
(such as Neurotics Anonymous) have established authority to the same
extent as in the United States. The persons she followed tacked back and
forth, sometimes chaotically, among the explanations of these various
schools.
11. Compare Habermass examinations (1975, 1984, 1987) of the general
forms of communicative practice in relation to authoritative, often statesponsored, discourses. Our view owes a more obvious debt to Bourdieu.
Ex
am
7.
8.
9.
Ex
10.
py
6.
people say and do; see Strauss (1990). Our interpretations are compatible
with Strausss position, but we add a temporal dimension by always considering peoples acts and self-understandings within the context of heuristic development. For a psychoanalytic perspective see Ewing (1990)
and Obeyesekere (1981).
The possibility that somewhere there exist the encompassing resources
and consistently effective social work required to produce a single, transcendent self seems very small. As described in Chapter 4, the personal
story of Alcoholics Anonymous posits a self for alcoholics that crosses
many situations and contexts. Yet, as Hank says about his own story,
there was a life, too.
One important exception to the pattern of not talking much about rituals
concerned Tij, which we discuss later in this chapter and in Chapter 12.
Two people from other areas of Nepal were appalled when they heard
of this scolding, saying they had never been scolded in such a way when
they were children and had never even heard it in their villages. They associated such scolding with poorer and lower-caste and lower-class families. In Naudada not all parents scolded their children this way, but parents from all castes did so. Some parents said they did not know how to
scold, distinguishing themselves from those who did such things, but
even they could be heard scolding their children in such a way when they
were angry.
Holland (1988) describes these sorts of representations for oneself as
epitomized scenes. Willis (1981) writes of an internal interlocutor.
For other references on the dialogic self see Abu-Lughod (1990).
This notion of sense is, in Vygotskys conception, the currency of inner
speaking. When extended to the embodiment of all means of expression
(as inner activity), it becomes like Bourdieus understanding of practical
sense, sens pratique (see Chapter 8).
We have done extensive research on Tij songs as a form of womens
critical commentary: see Holland and Skinner (1995a, 1995b, 1996);
Skinner (1990); Skinner et al. (1994). For other accounts see Enslin
(1992, 1998); Raheja and Gold (1994).
Thakali is an ethnic group whose members run tea shops and hotels
where various kinds of liquor are available.
See Egnor (1986) and Raheja and Gold (1994) for other accounts of
South Asian womens songs as expressions of alternative visions of femininity and as vehicles for the production of both selves and cultural
meanings.
Sites and activities other than Tij, such as schools, literacy classes, the
activities of political workers, and womens organizations, are also impor-
Co
5.
am
312
11.
12.
13.
313
py
tant in this regard (see Enslin 1990, 1998; Skinner and Holland 1996;
Skinner et al. 1998), but the development of this critical commentary in
Tij antedates by far its development in these other sites (Skinner et al.
1994).
Ex
am
Co
11.
12.
13.
py
10.
(Wilcox 1930; Lewis 1936; Kelly 1952). One of the more popular forms
of the trobar, the tenso, did take the form of a debate over questions of love
(or other topics).
Various literary and intellectual sources have been named as origins of
courtly love. The Hispano-arabic thesis (Dawson 1935; Denomy 1947;
Daniel 1975; see Boase 1977) is perhaps the best supported. Lewis (1936)
championed Ovid; Denomy (1947), neoplatonism; Rougemont (1956),
Catharist doctrine; and Briffault (1965), Marianism and older fertility
cults.
In this treatise Capellanus goes so far as to discuss the love of nuns, which
was to his mind the most chaste and unattainable of all such loves
though it was often not held in such high regard by popular reputation.
The cult of Mary, Mariolatry, may have beneted from this development,
for, some have argued, the devices that live on in ecstatic religious poetry
resemble the praise of the troubadours for their beloved.
Such gured worlds and their associated imagined communities are objects of controversy. The gured world of race relations is another extremely contested social venue in contemporary America. It has heroes
and villainsMartin Luther King Jr. and Orville Faubus, Malcolm X and
Lyndon Johnson, Stokely Carmichael and Bull Connorand events
evoked by the names of towns and citiesLittle Rock, Montgomery,
Selma, and so on. But who is villain and who is hero? What is the signicance of these events? The accent, tone, and value of gure and scene
vary according to the positions of the persons one asks.
In the cultural studies literature their propagations have been called panics (Hall et al. 1978).
Co
9.
am
314
Ex
1. Tij means third day. The festival occurs on the third day of the bright
fortnight of the Nepali month of Bhadra.
2. We collected verses from and/or information about roughly 1,000 songs.
For 26 songs, in both English and Nepali, see Skinner, Holland, and
Adhikari (1994). For more detailed analyses see that article and Holland
and Skinner (1995a).
3. For more on the complexities of the Tij festival and its relationship to
the larger social and political context see Holland and Skinner (1995a,
1995b); Skinner et al. (1994).
4. Women sometimes called upon priests to guide the puja that is part of the
TijRishi Pancami complex, but not to explain the meaning of the fasting
and the ritual bathing as interpreted through the textual accounts of the
8.
9.
10.
11.
Ex
12.
py
7.
Co
6.
Hindu gods, goddesses, and holy men. The most learned priest said no
one consulted him; they lacked interest.
Although men were invited to participate in mela (work parties), they
were not usually permanent members of a parma group.
In spite of the religious themes of the ritual complex and its dedication to
husbands well-being, the overwhelming majority of Tij songs were neither about gods and goddesses (deuta songs) nor about devotion to husbands. Only a very small proportion of the songs we collected from older
women and of those in two other collections of Tij songs that we saw were
deuta songs (see Skinner et al. 1994). We heard no deuta songs on Tij Day.
Women with several children were less likely to return to their natal
home for Tij. Those whose parents had died were especially unlikely to
return.
Married women were also allowed to travel home during Tihar, for a
ceremony in which the sister carries out rites that protect the brother
from death in the coming year. When a sister was still residing in the natal
home, however, the married sister was not always invited. There was not
the same anticipation that all the younger married daughters would return home, nor was there license for women to gather together for singing
and dancing. Unlike Tij, Tihar was a family affair, conned to each household, and not a matter of the didi/bahini of the gaon.
In the Tamang womens life narratives described by March (1988),
women emphasized the right to speak in their natal familys home and the
injunction to silence in their husbands familys home.
Tragic events that happened in the ten gaons nearest the tati (public
space) where the Tij groups performed were not sung about on Tij Day.
No group prepared a ghatana song, for example, about the deaths of
Naudadans run over by a truck a few weeks before the 1991 festival. We
were told that such songs would cause the relatives too much pain.
Holland and Skinner (1995a) detail how this shift from local, familial
relations to the world of antigovernment activity and party politics was
able to occur so rapidly.
Hybrid forms, as thoroughly dialogized speech, refract the voices that are
juxtaposed. They not only create a novel social standpointhere a distinctly feminine (perhaps even a feminist) political agentbut also
change the social positions of the element voices. The articulation and
reproduction of the hybrid regures the space of authorship, multiplying
the possible ways of identifying activity. The Tij songbooks that have
proliferated in Nepal since 1990 recognize the changed shape of both
womens authority and political opportunity.
The song pivot also exists in womens intimate activity: Skinners inform-
am
5.
13.
315
316
py
ants not only sang to themselves, they even sang some of their answers to
her questions in the words of Tij songs. The world of Tij has long transcended the temporal and spatial bounds of the festival.
Ex
am
Co
py
References
Ex
am
Co
Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1986. Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
1990. The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power
through Bedouin Women. American Ethnologist 17(1): 4155.
Alcoholics Anonymous. 1967. What Happened to Joeand His Drinking Problem. . . . New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services [hereafter
AAWS].
1968a. AA for the Woman. New York: AAWS.
1968b. It Happened to Alice! . . . How She Faced a Drinking Problem. New
York: AAWS.
1976. Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How Many Thousands of Men
and Women Have Recovered from Alcoholism. 3rd ed. New York: AAWS.
1979a. Time to Start Living: Stories of Those Who Came to AA in Their
Later Years. New York: AAWS.
1979b. Too Young? Teenagers and AA. New York: AAWS.
1979c. Young People and AA. New York: AAWS.
1980. Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers: A Biography with Recollections of
Early AA in the Midwest. New York: AAWS.
American Psychiatric Association. 1987. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders. 3rd ed. rev. [DSM-III-R]. Washington: APA.
1994. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 4th ed.
[DSM-IV]. Washington: APA.
Amit-Talai, Vered. 1995. Conclusion: The Multi Cultural of Youth. In AmitTalai and Wulff, eds., 1995, 223233.
Amit-Talai, Vered, and Helena Wulff, eds. 1995. Youth Culture: A Cross-cultural
Perspective. New York: Routledge.
Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. London: Verso.
Andreas Capellanus. 1941. The Art of Courtly Love. Trans. John J. Parry. New
York: Columbia University Press.
317
318
References
Ex
am
Co
py
References
319
Ex
am
Co
py
320
References
Ex
am
Co
py
1995. Wandering the Streets without Direction: The Search for Meaning in Mental Illness in Costa Rica. Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill.
Calhoun, Craig. 1991. Indirect Relationships and Imagined Communities:
Large-scale Social Integration and the Transformation of Everyday Life. In
Social Theory for a Changing Society, ed. P. Bourdieu and J. S. Coleman, 95
121. Boulder: Westview.
Cameron, D., F. McAlindon, and K. OLeary. 1988. Lakoff in Context: The
Social and Linguistic Function of Tag Questions. In Women in Their Speech
Communities: New Perspectives on Language and Sex, ed. J. Coates and
D. Cameron, 7493. New York: Longman.
Caplan, Patricia. 1985. Class and Gender in India: Women and Their Organizations
in a South India City. London and New York: Tavistock.
Caughey, John L. 1984. Imaginary Social Worlds: A Cultural Approach. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press.
Clark, Katerina, and Michael Holquist. 1984. Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Clement, D. C. 1982. Samoan Cultural Knowledge of Mental Disorders. In
Cultural Conceptions of Mental Health and Therapy, ed. A. J. Marsella and
G. M. White, 193215. Dordrecht: D. Reidel.
Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-century Ethnography,
Literature and Art. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Coelho, George V., David A. Hamburg, and John E. Adams, eds. 1974. Coping
and Adaptation. New York: Basic Books.
Cole, Michael. 1985. The Zone of Proximal Development: Where Culture and
Cognition Create Each Other. In Wertsch, ed., 1985, 146161.
1996. Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Connell, R. W. 1987. Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics.
Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Conrad, Peter, and Joseph W. Schneider. 1980. Deviance and Medicalization:
From Badness to Sickness. St. Louis: C. V. Mosby.
Crapanzano, Vincent. 1980. Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
1990. On Self Characterization. In Cultural Psychology: Essays in Comparative Human Development, ed. J. W. Stigler, R. A. Shweder, and G. Herdt,
401423. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Csordas, Thomas. 1994. The Sacred Self. Berkeley: University of California Press.
DAndrade, Roy. 1981. The Cultural Part of Cognition. Cognitive Science 5:
179195.
1992. Schemas and Motivation. In Human Motives and Cultural Models,
References
321
Ex
am
Co
py
322
References
Ex
am
Co
py
Engels, Frederick. 1968. The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to
Man. In The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, ed. Eleanor
Leacock, 251264. New York: New World Books.
Engestrm, Yrjo. 1987. Learning by Expanding: An Activity Theoretical Approach
to Developmental Research. Helsinki: Orienta-Konsultit Oy.
1990. Learning, Working and Imagining: Twelve Studies in Activity Theory.
Helsinki: Proemta-Konsultit.
1992. Interactive Expertise: Studies in Distributed Working Intelligence. Dept. of Education, Research Bulletin 83. Helsinki: University of
Helsinki.
Enslin, Elizabeth. 1990. The Dynamics of Gender, Class, and Caste in a
Womens Movement in Rural Nepal. Ph.D. diss., Stanford University.
1992. Collective Powers in Common Places: The Politics of Gender and
Space in a Womans Struggle for a Meeting Center in Chitwan, Nepal. Himalayan Research Bulletin 12: 1126.
1998. Imagined Sisters: The Ambiguities of Womens Poetics and Collective Actions. In Selves in Time and Place: Identities, Experience, and History in Nepal, ed. Debra Skinner, Alfred Pach III, and Dorothy Holland,
269299. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littleeld.
Erikson, Erik. 1963. Childhood and Society. 2nd ed. New York: Norton.
1968. Identity: Youth and Crisis. New York: Norton.
Erikson, Kai T. 1957. Patient Role and Social Uncertainty: A Dilemma of the
Mentally Ill. Psychiatry 20: 263272.
1962. Notes on the Sociology of Deviance. Social Problems 9: 307314.
Ewing, Katherine P. 1990. The Illusion of Wholeness: Culture, Self, and the
Experience of Inconsistency. Ethos 18(3): 251278.
Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Faulkner, William. 1936. Absalom, Absalom! New York: Modern Library.
Favret-Saada, J. 1980. Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage. Trans. C. Cullen.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fillmore, Charles. 1975. An Alternative to Checklist Theories of Meaning. In
Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, ed.
C. Cogne et al., 123131. Berkeley: University of California Press.
1982. Towards a Descriptive Framework for Spatial Deixis. In Speech,
Place, and Action, ed. R. J. Jarvella and W. Klein, 3159. New York: Wiley.
Fogelson, R. D. 1979. Person, Self, and Identity: Some Anthropological Retrospects, Circumspects, and Prospects. In Psychosocial Theories of the Self, ed.
B. Lee, 67109. New York: Plenum.
Fordham, Signithia. 1993 Those Loud Black Girls: (Black) Women, Silence,
and Gender Passing in the Academy. Anthropology and Education Quarterly
24(1): 332.
References
323
Ex
am
Co
py
Foucault, Michel. 1965. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age
of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Random House.
1978. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley.
New York: Pantheon.
1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan.
New York: Random House.
Frappier, Jean. 1972. Sur un procs fait lamour courtois. Romania 93: 145
193.
Gal, Susan. 1987. Language and Political Economy. Annual Reviews in Anthropology 18: 345367.
Gearing, F., T. Carroll, L. Richter, P. Grogan-Hurlick, A. Smith, W. Hughes, B.
Tindall, W. Precourt, and S. Topfer. 1979. Working Paper 6. In Toward a
Cultural Theory of Education and Schooling, ed. F. Gearing and L. Sangree,
938. The Hague: Mouton.
Geertz, Clifford. 1973a. Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockght. In Geertz,
The Interpretation of Cultures, 412453. New York: Basic Books.
1973b. Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.
In Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 332. New York: Basic Books.
Gergen, Kenneth. 1984. An Introduction to Historical Social Psychology. In
Historical Social Psychology, ed. K. J. Gergen and M. M. Gergen, 336.
Hillsdale, N. J.: Erlbaum.
1991. The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life. New
York: Basic Books.
1994. Realities and Relationships: Soundings in Social Construction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Gibson, James J. 1979. The Senses Compared as Perceptual Systems. Boston:
Houghton Mifin.
Goffman, Erving. 1961. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients
and Other Inmates. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor.
Goodenough, Ward. 1994. Toward a Working Theory of Culture. In Assessing
Cultural Anthropology, ed. R. Borofsky, 262273. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Goodman, James C. 1981. Shivas Scarlet Women. ASIA (Sept.Oct.): 2025.
Gove, Walter R. 1970. Societal Reaction as an Explanation of Mental Illness: An
Evaluation. American Sociological Review 35: 873884.
1980. Labeling and Mental Illness: A Critique. In Labeling Deviant
Behavior, ed. Walter R. Gove, 53109. Beverly Hills: Sage.
Greeneld, Patricia M. 1984. A Theory of the Teacher in the Learning Activities
of Everyday Life. In Everyday Cognition: Its Development in Social Context,
ed. B. Rogoff and J. Lave, 117138. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press.
Gregor, Thomas. 1977. The Mehinaku: The Drama of Everyday Life in a Brazilian
Indian Village. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
324
References
Ex
am
Co
py
Grob, Gerald N. 1973. Mental Institutions in America: Social Policy to 1875. New
York: Free Press.
1983. Mental Illness and American Society. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
1991. From Asylum to Community: Mental Health Policy in Modern America. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Gumperz, John, and Dell Hymes, eds. 1972. Directions in Sociolinguistics: The
Ethnography of Communication. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Habermas, Jrgen. 1975. Legitimation Crisis. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston:
Beacon.
1984. The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon.
1987. The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston:
Beacon.
Hacking, Ian. 1995. Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of
Memory. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Hall, Stuart. 1996. Introduction: Who Needs Identity? In Questions of Cultural
Identity, ed. S. Hall and P. Du Gay, 117. London: Sage.
Hall, Stuart, C. Critcher, T. Jefferson, J. Clarke, and B. Roberts. 1978. Policing the
Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. New York: Holmes and Meier.
Hallowell, A. I. 1955a. The Ojibwa Self and Its Behavioral Environment. In
Hallowell, Culture and Experience, 172182. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
1955b. The Self and Its Behavioral Environment. In Hallowell, Culture
and Experience, 75110. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Hannerz, Ulf. 1983. Tools of Identity and Imagination. In Identity: Personal and
Socio-cultural, ed. Anita Jacobson-Widding, 347360. Atlantic Highlands,
N.J.: Humanities Press.
Haraway, D. 1988. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism
and the Privilege of the Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies 14: 575600.
Harr, Rom. 1979. Social Being: A Theory for Social Psychology. Oxford: Blackwell.
1984. Personal Being: A Theory of Individual Psychology. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Harr, R., and L. Van Langenhove. 1991. Varieties of Positioning. Journal for
the Theory of Social Behavior 21: 391407.
Harris, G. G. 1989. Concepts of Individual, Self, and Person in Description and
Analysis. American Anthropologist 91: 599612.
Harvey, David. 1996. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge,
Mass.: Blackwell.
References
325
Ex
am
Co
py
326
References
Ex
am
Co
py
Holland, Dorothy, and Debra Skinner. 1987. Prestige and Intimacy: The Cultural Models behind Americans Talk about Gender Types. In Holland and
Quinn, eds., 1987, 78111.
1995a. Contested Ritual, Contested Femininities: (Re)forming Self and
Society in a Nepali Womens Festival. American Ethnologist 22: 279305.
1995b. Not Written by the Fate-writer: The Agency in Womens Critical
Commentary in Nepal. Folk: The Journal of the Danish Ethnographic Society
37: 103133.
1996. The Co-development of Identity, Agency, and Lived Worlds. In
Comparisons in Human Development: Understanding Time and Context, ed.
J. Tudge, M. Shanahan, and J. Valsiner, 193221. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Hollway, W. 1984. Gender Difference and the Production of Subjectivity. In
Henriques et al., 1984, 227263.
Holquist, Michael. 1981. Politics of Representation. In Allegory in Representation, ed. S. Greenblatt, 163185. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press.
1990. Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World. New York: Routledge.
Howard, Donald R. 1966. The Three Temptations: Medieval Man in Search of the
World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Huizinga, Johan. 1955. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture.
Boston: Beacon.
1956. The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought
and Art in France and the Netherlands in the XIVth and XVth Centuries. Garden
City, N.Y.: Doubleday.
Hutchins, Edwin. 1986. Mediation and Automatization. Quarterly Newsletter
of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition 8(2): 4758.
1987. Myth and Experience in the Trobriand Islands. In Holland and
Quinn, eds., 1987, 269289.
Inden, Ronald. 1990. Imagining India. Oxford: Blackwell.
Irvine, Judith T. 1980. How Not to Ask a Favor in Wolof. Papers in Linguistics
13: 350.
1985. Status and Style in Language. Annual Reviews in Anthropology
14: 557581.
1989. When Talk Isnt Cheap: Language and Political Economy. American Ethnologist 16(2): 248267.
Ito, K. L. 1987. Emotions, Proper Behavior (hana pono) and Hawaiian Concepts
of Self, Person, and Individual. In Contemporary Issues in Mental Health
Research in the Pacic Islands, ed. A. B. Robillard and A. J. Marsella, 4571.
Honolulu: University of Hawaii, Social Science Research Institute.
Jackson, W. T. H. 1960. The Literature of the Middle Ages. New York: Columbia
University Press.
References
327
Ex
am
Co
py
Jaeger, C. Stephen. 1985. The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the
Formation of Courtly Ideals, 9391210. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Joas, Hans. 1985. G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of His Thought.
Trans. Raymond Meyer. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Johnson, Richard. 198687. What Is Cultural Studies Anyway? Social Text:
Theory/Culture/Ideology 16(Winter): 3880.
Joravsky, David. 1989. Russian Psychology: A Critical History. Oxford: Blackwell.
Kay, Sarah. 1990. Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kelly, Amy. 1952. Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings. London: Cassell.
Kitayama, S., H. Markus, and C. Lieberman. 1994. The Collective Construction
of Self-esteem: Implications for Culture, Self, and Emotion. In Everyday
Conceptions of Emotion, ed. J. A. Russell, et al., 523570. Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic.
Kondo, D. K. 1990. Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a
Japanese Workplace. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kozulin, Alex. 1986. Vygotsky in Context. In Vygotsky, Thought and Language,
trans. Alex Kozulin, xilvi. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Kuhn, Manford, and Thomas S. McPartland. 1954. An Empirical Investigation
of Self-attitudes. American Sociological Review 19(1): 6876.
Kuhn, Thomas. 1962. The Structure of Scientic Revolutions. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Kulick, Don. 1993. Speaking as a Woman: Structure and Gender in Domestic
Arguments in a New Guinea Village. Cultural Anthropology 8(4): 411429.
Lachicotte, William S. 1992. On the Borderline: Profession, Imagination and
Authority in the Practice of Mental Health Care. Ph.D. diss., University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ann Arbor: University Microlms.
Lakoff, Robin. 1975. Language and Womans Place. New York: Harper and Row.
Lancaster, Roger N. 1992. Life Is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of
Power in Nicaragua. Berkeley: University of California Press.
1996. Gutos Performance: Notes on the Transvestism of Everyday
Life. Presented at the Department of Anthropology Colloquium, University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, March 28.
Lave, Jean. 1988. Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics and Culture in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral
Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Leavitt, John. 1996. Meaning and Feeling in the Anthropology of Emotions.
American Ethnologist 23: 514539.
Lederman, Rena. 1984. Who Speaks Here? Formality and the Politics of Gender
in Mendi, Highland Papua New Guinea. In Dangerous Words: Language and
328
References
Ex
am
Co
py
Politics in the Pacic, ed. D. L. Brenneis and F. R. Myers, 85107. New York:
New York University Press.
Lee, Benjamin. 1985. Intellectual Origins of Vygotskys Semiotic Analysis. In
Wertsch, ed., 1985, 6693.
Lee, Benjamin, and Maya Hickman. 1983. Language, Thought, and Self in
Vygotskys Developmental Theory. In Developmental Approaches to the Self,
ed. B. Lee and G. Noam, 343378. New York: Plenum.
Leontiev, A. N. 1978. Activity, Consciousness, and Personality. Englewood Cliffs,
N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
LeVine, R. A. 1982. Culture, Behavior, and Personality: An Introduction to the Comparative Study of Psychosocial Adaptation. Chicago: Aldine.
Lvi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Lewis, C. S. 1936. The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Luhrmann, Tanya M. 1989. Persuasions of the Witchs Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Luria, Alexander R. 1979. The Making of Mind: A Personal Account of Soviet
Psychology. Ed. Michael and Sheila Cole. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
1981. Language and Cognition. Ed. J. V. Wertsch. New York: Wiley.
Luttrell, Wendy. 1996. Becoming Somebody (or Not): The Schooling of Gendered Selves. In The Cultural Production of the Educated Person: Critical
Ethnographies of Schooling and Local Practice, ed. B. A. Levinson, D. E. Foley,
and D. C. Holland, 93117. Albany: SUNY Press.
Lutz, Catherine. 1987. Goals, Events, and Understanding in Ifaluk Emotion
Theory. In Holland and Quinn, eds., 1987, 290312.
1988. Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll
and Their Challenge to Western Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1990. Engendered Emotion: Gender, Power, and the Rhetoric of Emotional Control in American Discourse. In Lutz and Abu-Lughod, eds., 1990,
6992.
1995. The Gender of Theory. In Women Writing Culture, ed. Ruth
Behar and Deborah A. Gordon, 249266. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
In press. The Psychological Ethnic and the Spirit of Permanent War:
The Military Production of Twentieth-Century American Subjects. In The
Invention of the Psychological: The Cultural History of Emotions in America, ed.
J. Pster and N. Schnog,. New Haven: Yale University Press,.
Lutz, C., and Abu-Lughod, L. 1990. Introduction: Emotion, Discourse, and the
Politics of Everyday Life. In Lutz and Abu-Lughod, eds., 1990, 123.
References
329
Ex
am
Co
py
330
References
Ex
am
Co
py
McDermott, R. P. 1974. Achieving School Failure: An Anthropological Approach to Illiteracy and Social Stratication. In Education and Cultural Process: Toward an Anthropology of Education, ed. G. D. Spindler, 82118. New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
McHugh, E. 1989. Concepts of the Person among the Gurungs of Nepal.
American Ethnologist 16: 7586.
McLeod, Enid. 1976. The Order of the Rose: The Life and Ideals of Christine de
Pizan. London: Chatto and Windus.
Mead, G. H. 1934. Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Miller, J. G. 1988. Bridging the Content-Structure Dichotomy: Culture and the
Self. In The Cross-Cultural Challenge to Social Psychology, ed. M. H. Bond,
267328. Newbury Park: Sage.
Millon, Theodore. 1981. Disorders of Personality. DSM III: Axis II. New York:
Wiley.
1985. Personality and Its Disorders: A Biosocial Learning Approach. New
York: Wiley.
1990. Toward a New Personology: An Evolutionary Model. New York:
Wiley.
Millon, Theodore, and Gerald L. Klerman, eds. 1986. Contemporary Directions in
Psychopathology: Towards the DSM-IV. New York: Guilford.
Mines, M. 1988. Conceptualizing the Person: Hierarchical Society and Individual Autonomy in India. American Anthropologist 90: 568579.
Monat, Alan, and Richard S. Lazarus, eds. 1977. Stress and Coping: An Anthology.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson. 1990. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a
Prosaics. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Murray, D. W. 1993. What Is the Western Concept of the Self? On Forgetting
David Hume. Ethos 21: 323.
Neilson, William A. 1967. The Origins and Sources of the Court of Love. Rpt. of
1899 ed. New York: Russell and Russell.
Neisser, Ulric. 1988. Five Kinds of Self Knowledge. Philosophical Psychology
1(1): 3559.
Newman, F. X., ed. 1968. The Meaning of Courtly Love. Albany: State University
of New York Press.
Nuckolls, Charles W. 1992a. Toward a Cultural History of the Personality Disorders. Social Science and Medicine 35(1): 3747.
1992b. Notes on a Defrocked Priest: The Cynosure in South Indian
Shamanic and American Psychiatric Diagnosis. In Ethnopsychiatry, ed. Atwood D. Gaines, 6984. Albany: SUNY Press.
OBarr, William, and Bowman Atkins. 1980. Womens Language or Powerless
Language? In Women and Language in Literature and Society, ed. Sally
References
331
Ex
am
Co
py
332
References
Ex
am
Co
py
from Wives Inner Conicts. In Human Motives and Cultural Models, ed.
R. G. DAndrade and C. Strauss, 90126. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Quinn, Naomi, and Dorothy Holland. 1987. Culture and Cognition. In Holland and Quinn, eds., 1987, 340.
Quinn, Naomi, and Claudia Strauss. 1994. A Cognitive Cultural Anthropology. In Assessing Cultural Anthropology, ed. R. Borofsky, 284297. New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Raheja, Gloria G., and Ann G. Gold. 1994. Listen to the Herons Words: Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Reidel, Brian. 1994. Personal communication.
Reiter, R. R., ed. 1975. Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York: Monthly
Review Press.
Robbins, R. H. 1973. Identity, Culture and Behavior. In Handbook of Social
and Cultural Anthropology, ed. J. J. Honigmann, 11991222. Chicago: Rand
McNally.
Robertson, D. W. 1962. Some Medieval Doctrines of Love. In Robertson, A
Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives, 391503. Princeton,
N. J.: Princeton University Press.
1968. The Concept of Courtly Love as an Impediment to the Understanding of Medieval Texts. In Newman, ed., 1968, 118.
Robins, Lee N. 1980. Alcoholism and Labelling Theory. In Readings in Medical
Sociology, ed. D. Mechanic, 180198. New York: Free Press.
Robinson, David. 1979. Talking out of Alcoholism: The Self-help Process of Alcoholics Anonymous. Baltimore: University Park Press.
Rogoff, Barbara. 1990. Apprenticeship in Thinking: Cognitive Development in Social Context. New York: Oxford University Press.
Roiphe, Katie. 1993. The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus.
Boston: Little, Brown.
Rosaldo, Michelle Z. 1980. Knowledge and Passion: Ilongot Notions of Self and
Social Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
1984. Toward an Anthropology of Self and Feeling. In Culture Theory:
Essays on Mind, Self and Emotion, ed. R. A. Shweder and R. A. LeVine, 137
157. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rougemont, Denis de. 1956. Love in the Western World. Trans. M. Belgion. New
York: Pantheon.
Rouse, Roger. 1995. Questions of Identity: Personhood and Collectivity in
Transnational Migration to the United States. Critique of Anthropology
15(4): 351380.
References
333
Ex
am
Co
py
Sahlins, Marshall D. 1995. How Natives Think: About Captain Cook, for Example. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sanday, Peggy R. 1990. Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex, Brotherhood and Privilege on
Campus. New York: New York University Press.
Sanders, W. B. 1980. Rape and Womans Identity. Sage Library of Social Research
no. 106. Beverly Hills: Sage.
Schade-Poulson, Marc. 1995. The Power of Love: Ra Music and Youth in
Algeria. In Amit-Talai and Wulff, eds., 1995, 81113.
Scheff, Thomas J. 1966. Being Mentally Ill: A Sociological Theory. Chicago: Aldine.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1992. Hungry Bodies, Medicine, and the State: Toward
a Critical Psychological Anthropology. In New Directions in Psychological
Anthropology, ed. T. Schwartz, G. M. White, and C. A. Lutz, 221247. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schur, Edwin. 1980. The Politics of Deviance: Stigma Contests and the Uses of
Power. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall.
Schwartz, Gary, and Don Merten. 1968. Social Identity and Expressive Symbols:
The Meaning of an Initiation Ritual. American Anthropologist 70: 111731.
Scott, Robert A. 1969. The Making of Blind Men: A Study of Adult Socialization.
New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Selye, Hans. 1956. The Stress of Life. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Shepel, Elina. 1995. Teacher Self-identication in Culture from Vygotskys Developmental Perspective. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 26: 425
442.
Shotter, John. 1982. Consciousness, Self-consciousness, Inner Games, and Alternative Realities. In Aspects of Consciousness: Awareness and Self-awareness, vol. 3, ed. G. Underwood, 2761. London: Academic Press.
Shweder, R. A. 1991. Thinking through Cultures: Expeditions in Cultural Psychology. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Shweder, R. A., and E. J. Bourne. 1984. Does the Concept of Person Vary Crossculturally? In Shweder and R. A. LeVine, eds., Culture Theory: Essays on
Mind, Self, and Emotion, 158199. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Siegler, Miriam, and Humphrey Osmond. 1974. Models of Madness, Models of
Medicine. New York: Macmillan.
Skinner, Debra. 1989. The Socialization of Gender Identity: Observations from
Nepal. In Child Development in Cultural Context, ed. J. Valsiner, 181192.
Toronto: Hogrefe and Huber.
1990. Nepalese Childrens Understanding of Themselves and Their
Social World. Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Skinner, Debra, and Dorothy Holland. 1996. Schools and the Cultural Produc-
334
References
Ex
am
Co
py
References
335
Ex
am
Co
py
Tannen, Deborah. 1990. You Just Dont Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. New York: Morrow.
Thompson, E. P. 1963. The Making of the English Working Class. New York:
Pantheon.
Thomsen, Robert. 1975. Bill W. New York: Harper and Row.
Titunik, I. R. 1987. Translators Introduction. In V. N. Voloshinov, Freudianism:
A Critical Sketch, ed. I. R. Titunik and N. H. Bruss, trans. I. R. Titunik, xv
xxv. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Todorov, Tzvetan. 1984. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle. Trans. Wlad
Godzich. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Tolman, C. W., and W. Maiers, eds. 1991. Critical Psychology: Contributions to an
Historical Science of the Subject. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Townsend, J. M. 1976. Self-concept and the Institutionalization of Mental Patients: An Overview and Critique. Journal of Health and Social Behavior
17(3): 263271.
Traube, Elizabeth. 1992. Dreaming Identities: Class, Gender, and Generation in
1980s Hollywood Movies. Boulder: Westview.
Trosset, Carol S. 1986. The Social Identity of Welsh Learners. Language in
Society 15(2): 165192.
Turner, Terrence. 1969. Tchikrin: A Central Brazilian Tribe and Its Symbolic
Language of Bodily Adornment. Natural History 78: 5059.
Valsiner, Jaan. 1993. Bi-directional Cultural Transmission and Constructive
Sociogenesis. In Sociogenesis Reexamined, ed. W. de Graff and R. Mair, 47
70. New York: Springer.
van der Veer, Ren, and Jaan Valsiner. 1991. Understanding Vygotsky: A Quest for
Synthesis. Oxford: Blackwell.
1994. Reading Vygotsky: From Fascination to Construction. In The
Vygotsky Reader, ed. R. van der Veer and J. Valsiner, trans. T. Prout and R. van
der Veer, 19. Oxford: Blackwell.
Van Gennep, Arnold. 1960/1909. The Rites of Passage. Trans. M. B. Vizedom and
G. L. Caffee. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Voloshinov, V. N. 1986. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press.
1987. Freudianism: A Critical Sketch. Ed. I. R. Titunik and N. H. Bruss,
trans. I. R. Titunik. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Vygotsky, L. S. 1930. The Primitive Man and His Behavior. In Etiudy po isotorii
povedeniya, ed. L. S. Vygotsky and A. R. Luria, 54121. Moscow-Leningrad:
Gosudarstvennoye Izdatelstvo. (In Russian.)
1960. Development of Higher Psychical Functions (Razvitie vyshhih
psihicheskih funktsii). (In Russian.) Moscow: Izd. APN.
1971. The Psychology of Art. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
336
References
Ex
am
Co
py
References
337
Ex
am
Co
py
1992. Ethnopsychology. In New Directions in Psychological Anthropology, ed. T. Schwartz, G. M. White, and C. Lutz, 2146. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
1993. Emotions Inside Out: The Anthropology of Affect. In Handbook
of Emotion, ed. M. Lewis and J. Haviland, 2939. New York: Guilford.
Wilcox, John. 1930. Dening Courtly Love. Michigan Academy of Science, Arts
and Letters 12: 313325.
Willard, Charity C. 1984. Christine de Pizan: Her Life and Works. New York:
Persea Books.
Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Willis, Paul. 1981. Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class
Jobs. New York: Columbia University Press.
Willis, Susan. 1991. A Primer of Everyday Life. London: Routledge.
Wood, D. J., J. S. Brunner, and G. Ross. 1976. The Role of Tutoring in Problem
Solving. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 17: 89100.
Wulff, Helena. 1995. Interracial Friendships: Consuming Youth Styles, Ethnicity and Teenage Femininity in South London. In Amit-Talai and Wulff, eds.,
1995, 6380.
Young, Alan. 1996. The Harmony of Illusions. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
py
Co
am
Ex
Copyright 1998 The President and Fellows of Harvard College
py
Credits
Ex
am
Co
py
Co
am
Ex
Copyright 1998 The President and Fellows of Harvard College
Angevins, 242244
Answering/answerability, 169, 172173,
177, 186, 189, 208
Anthropology, 4, 7, 1517, 2032, 38, 54,
99100, 127, 131, 169, 280
Anxiety disorders, 196197
Aquitaine, 240, 242, 244
Aretxaga, Begona, 290n13
Arnold, Benedict, 248
Arns, Flavio J., 177
Arthurian romances, 244, 247
Artifacts. See Cultural artifacts
Asad, Talal, 23
Atkins, Bowman, 12, 130
Attractiveness, 5657, 59, 104, 106, 112,
129130, 137, 145147, 152163, 166,
190
Austin, John L., 280
Authoring. See Self-authoring; Space of
authoring
Ex
am
Co
py
Index
341
Copyright 1998 The President and Fellows of Harvard College
Index
Chetri caste, 9, 11, 14, 216217, 219, 224,
227, 259, 274, 311n3
Chivalry, 243244
Chrtien de Troyes, 244245
Christine de Pizan, 245
Chronotopes, 171, 209
Class, 58, 286
Clement, D. C., 19, 30
Clifford, James, 23
Codevelopment, 45, 122, 251252
Cognitive salience, 105, 110, 115116, 118,
120122, 163
Cole, Michael, 37, 6163, 297n3
Collective meanings, 5, 22
Colonialism, 2324
Communism, 230, 249, 264, 284
Communities of practice, 5657, 60
Competency, 98, 117119, 121
Connell, R. W., 133, 146, 290n8
Conrad, Peter, 67
Constructivist perspective, 8, 1017, 2628,
4344, 5556, 62, 64, 131, 133, 273275
Context-sensitive rules, 13
Cooley, Charles H., 99
Cornwallis, Charles, 248
Counter-worlds, 250251, 267
Courtly love, 4546, 141, 239247, 273,
283, 286287
Crane, J., 16
Crapanzano, Vincent, 25, 55, 297n6, 304n11
Critical disruption, 2326
Csordas, Thomas, 22
Cultural artifacts, 15, 17, 28, 50, 235,
300nn2021; and materiality, 6064; and
positional identity, 127, 129130, 137
Cultural forms, 5, 8, 26, 31, 33, 45, 65, 285,
300n20; in Alcoholics Anonymous, 73,
88; and authoring selves, 173177, 185;
songs of Nepali women as, 231, 261; of
courtly love, 239; of nationalism, 249
Cultural heroes, 248249, 314n12
Cultural-historical school of psychology, 5
Cultural identity, 7
Culturalist perspective, 8, 1011, 1315,
2023, 27, 55, 131, 273275
Cultural logic, 9, 11, 1315, 17, 274
Cultural meaning systems, 11, 99100,
116118, 120121
Cultural means, 5355, 185
am
Co
py
342
Ex
Index
py
Co
Ex
am
343
Fabian, Johannes, 23
Fantasy, 4951, 236241, 285
Faulkner, William: Absalom, Absalom!
304n5
Favret-Saada, J., 25, 5556, 59
Feminist theory, 5, 7, 16, 2425, 44
Feudalism, 242, 283
Feuerbach, Ludwig, 35
Field of power, 58
Fields, 5860, 299nn1618
Figurative identity, 127128, 141
Figurative worlds, 53
Index
Gendering insults, 153155, 159
Gender labeling, 160
Gender-marked lexicons, 43, 102103,
151153, 155, 157, 160, 163
George III, 248
Gergen, Kenneth, 6, 212, 292n13
Getting the upper hand, 112, 117
Ghatana songs, 257, 276
Gibson, James J., 61
Goffman, Erving, 212, 274, 310n8
Gold, Ann G., 228
Goodenough, Ward, 57
Goodman, James C., 254
Good woman, life path of, 41, 5354, 140,
214223, 226, 255, 277
Gorkha, Nepal, 256, 263
Gower, John, 246
Grasse, Franois-Joseph-Paul de, 248
Greeneld, Patricia M., 84
Gregor, Thomas, 25, 51, 133134
Guided discovery, 297n4
Guilhem IX, 240, 242
Gumperz, John, 126
Gurung people, 291n3
am
Co
py
344
Ex
Index
py
am
Co
345
Ex
Index
Meaning systems, 11, 99100, 116118,
120121
Mediating devices, 3538, 50, 6162, 67, 71,
88, 96, 175, 185, 209, 235. See also
Semiotic mediation
Mehinaku people, 51, 133134
Menstruation, 253, 267
Mental health workers, 180182
Mental illness, 41, 43, 192213, 272,
275277
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 2223
Merten, Don, 68, 7273, 7576
Microcultures, 298n10
Miller, J. G., 20, 22, 31
Minick, Norris, 177
Mnemonic objects, 36
Motivation, 98, 100, 113, 121
Murray, D. W., 2930
Co
py
346
Ex
am
MacAndrew, Craig, 67
Machismo, 129130
Madison, James, 248
Major depressive disorder, 196
Malory, Thomas, 246
Mamet, David: Oleanna, 165, 283
Manic-depression, 4243, 196, 202203,
206207, 210211
March, Kathryn, 315n9
Marie of Champagne, 244, 246
Marion, Francis, 248
Markus, Hazel R., 30, 293n17, 302n5
Marriott, M., 21, 29
Marsh, Diane T., 311n9
Marx, Karl, 3435, 64; Kapital, 34
Marxism, 57, 64, 193, 284
Mary, Virgin, 245, 314n11
Mauss, Marcel, 87
McCall, George J., 289n2
McConnell-Ginet, Sally, 13
McDermott, R. P., 127
McHugh, E., 291n3
McLeod, Enid, 245
McPartland, Thomas S., 68
Mead, G. H., 4, 99, 172, 189190
Meaning, 5, 22, 170, 173, 177, 186187
Index
py
Ex
am
Co
347
Index
Skinner, Debra, 3, 911, 1314, 17, 43,
5354, 60, 102, 125, 137138, 140, 142,
145, 151, 214218, 222224, 228, 253,
255, 260263, 265266, 273, 284
Smith, N. B., 240
Smith, Paul, 29
Snow, J. T., 240
Social afliation, 127128
Social audience, 189
Social categories, 130131
Social constructivism. See Constructivist
perspective
Socially constructed self, 2628
Social position, 5, 1112, 14, 16, 33, 4445,
176, 294n18; and positional identity,
126128, 132139; in world of romance,
144, 155, 158; and identity in practice,
270271, 274275, 286287
Social psychology, 4, 6, 35
Social situation, 4, 9, 1112, 14
Social speech, 174175, 182, 184189, 283,
308n9
Social work, 134135, 271, 281286
Sociocentric self, 2931
Sociohistorical school of psychology, 5,
3338, 45, 5657, 60, 64, 138, 174, 177,
223, 270, 294n21
Sociology, 4, 6, 38, 127, 180181, 286
Southern University, 101
Soviet Union, 34, 64, 278
Space of authoring, 63, 169, 190, 193, 210,
272, 282284, 286287. See also
Self-authoring
Speakers meetings (AA), 77, 82, 87
Speech, 174178, 180, 182, 184189
Spenser, Edmund, 246
Spiro, Melford E., 2930, 99, 105, 116, 118,
120
Spradley, James, 3738, 193; You Owe
Yourself a Drunk, 67
Stalin, Joseph, 250
Status, 5859, 103104, 125, 131, 136, 158,
178
Stereotypical associations, in social
positioning, 130131
Stevens, John, 240
Stone, Linda, 216
Stone, Michael H., 199
Storylines, 297n4
Ex
am
Co
py
348
Index
Universalist perspective, 2023, 27
Universal self, 2122
py
Co
349
Ex
am